Films: 1980s
(1980) Inferno
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Inferno
Director: Dario Argento
Release: 1980
The prolific Italian director is a master of overwhelming the senses, achieving this through muted color schemes splashed against baroque set pieces, creative and suspenseful killings, and audience-in-the-action camera angles.
Yet, Argento's plots and connective themes are often underdeveloped and obtuse - about as easy to grasp as the mist that copiously drifts through his nocturnal worlds.
Such is the case with "Inferno," (1980) a colorful, cacophonous, sensory-overloading film that serves as a loose sequel to Argento's equally stunning but less confounding "Suspiria."
The delicate thread that draws the two films together is Argento's exploration of the triplet mothers who represent world's worst qualities. Mater Suspiriorum is the mother of sighs (and the oldest of the three); Mater Tenebrarum is the mother of darkness/shadows (and the cruelest and youngest of her sisters); and Mater Lachrymarum is the mother of tears (and the most beautiful of the trio).
In "Inferno," Argento delves into these wicked women: In the opening scene, New Yorker Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle) pores over an aged volume, "The Three Sisters," in a dusky room.
Within the book's aged binding, Rose reads that an architect built three dwellings for the mothers: One in Rome, (tears); one in New York City (darkness); and one in Freyburg, Germany (sighs).
In those cities, there are three clues to the mothers' presence: The land they inhabit is deadly and plagued and reeks horribly; the cellars beneath their dwellings contain their pictures and names; and the third hint is "under the soles of your shoes."
This last morsel is a metaphor that cuts to the film's central theme. The mothers are the symbol of death and all that is dark in the world. Their manifestations-although relevant to this film- aren't necessary. They're always present, all-seeing, forever ruling.
Fearing that one of the mothers might hold court under her brick apartment building, (as it turns out, one does) Rose mails a panicked letter to her brother Mark Elliot (Leigh McCloskey) in Rome. From there, curiosity draws the pleated skirt and high-heel wearing protagonist to explore her basement on a dark, rainy night.
Alley cats mewl; cobwebs flutter; water trickles. The lens, aimed toward the ground, traces the moist, dark basement from Rose's perspective. In such scenes, Argento displays atmospheric mastery.
Eventually, she comes upon a circular well in the cement floor and, bending down to inspect it, her serpent-shaped key chain slips into the water and sinks. After a blind, unsuccessful grope with her fingers, she dives in after it. In the watery space beneath, she beholds a high-ceilinged room with flowered carpets, chandeliers and a fireplace.
And in a moment of shock, she grapples with a floating corpse.
From that point on, after emerging from the hidden underwater world, she is pursued by unseen, whispering beings. Soon thereafter, her brother and his friend Sara (Eleonora Giorgi) are drawn into the chaos.
What follows is a disjointed mystery. The film leaps from Rome to New York and back again, while the three protagonists run wildly through damp, barren nether regions of buildings and a shadowy man with fingers curled like Nosferatu plunges knives into necks, rips out eyeballs and throws burning bodies out of windows. The menacing brute remains an ambiguous centerpiece; his identity and connection to the three mothers is never explained, nor is the reason behind the brutal slayings.
Other images and scenes are equally indiscernible. The killer's gloved fingers cut apart black paper dolls; rats devour a crutched book dealer. Cats, the harbingers of the underworld, appear everywhere. A gorgeous silver-eyed woman recurrently appears to Mark.
Rain explodes like gunshots on roofs; lights flicker; cascading piano notes and synthetic jazz music ratchets up the tension. Further plunging viewers in the scene, cameras menacingly approach doorways -- skulking past urns, statues and chests of drawers -- and hunker behind library stacks to watch terrified victims.
All this time, Argento also employs the atmospheric device of colored shadows: Nearly all scenes are swathed in the conflicting colors of red and blue. Sometimes both appear, clashing against one another.
Red, an emotionally intense color, conjures heat and the devil. Blue, meanwhile, is the shade of power, and it also stands for nature, invoking the sky and the ocean. With this mix, Argento invokes both chaos and calm.
Through all these methods, the director strives for abstraction, the primal reaction; to elicit an impulsive response with aesthetics.
And, although he achieves this effect, if it had been coupled with further exploration into the "roles" of the three mothers in society-and fewer jigsaw puzzle-like plot threads- Argento would have had a truly evocative thriller.
In the end, though, "Inferno" is a celluloid stream of consciousness. Terrifying and provocative ideas are presented and then abandoned like a half-formed thought.
Taryn Plumb
Cinescare Correspondent
Inferno, 1980
Through all these methods, the director strives for abstraction, the primal reaction; to elicit an impulsive response with aesthetics. And, although he achieves this effect, if it had been coupled with further exploration into the "roles" of the three mothers in society-and fewer jigsaw puzzle-like plot threads- Argento would have had a truly evocative thriller.
