Director: Dario Argento
Writers: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Thomas De Quincey
Photography: Luciano Tovoli
Music: Dario Argento, Goblin
Editor: Franco Fraticelli
Cast: Jessica Harper, Alida Valli, Joan Bennett, Stefania Casini, Udo Kier, Dario Argento
My hot take on the original Suspiria is that it’s chiefly designed as sensation, as experience—it’s always very good at exactly that. Bright colors and strange and disorienting lighting strategies abound. It’s scored by the Italian progressive rock band Goblin, who pound away or make disquieting noise at will. It’s a classic (if slightly later) Italian giallo but the cast includes Americans in leading roles. Jessica Harper (Phantom of the Paradise, Minority Report) was fresh off the Woody Allen movie Love and Death, and flinty Joan Bennett (Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window), at 67, was a certifiable grande dame of Hollywood. The picture even gives 19th-century reprobate Thomas De Quincey, author of the 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a writing credit—not for Opium-Eater but for a collection of hallucinatory prose poem essays, Suspiria de Profundis, specifically the one about Levana, the Roman goddess of childbirth.
As with much of the work of Italian director and cowriter Dario Argento, the plot barely matters in Suspiria because it so quickly and so often goes afield of logic or sense. Harper is Suzy Bannion, a young ballet dancer who has left the US to study at a prestigious dance academy in Freiburg, Germany. As it happens, the prestigious dance academy is actually a front for an ancient coven of witches, or something. Suzy knows things are not right there because on her arrival, near midnight of a stormy, rainy night, she witnesses a young woman flee out the front door into the nearby woods while the woman on the house intercom is telling Suzy to go away. Fortunately, Suzy asked the surly taxi driver to wait for her so at least she has a ride back into town.
My hot take on the original Suspiria is that it’s chiefly designed as sensation, as experience—it’s always very good at exactly that. Bright colors and strange and disorienting lighting strategies abound. It’s scored by the Italian progressive rock band Goblin, who pound away or make disquieting noise at will. It’s a classic (if slightly later) Italian giallo but the cast includes Americans in leading roles. Jessica Harper (Phantom of the Paradise, Minority Report) was fresh off the Woody Allen movie Love and Death, and flinty Joan Bennett (Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window), at 67, was a certifiable grande dame of Hollywood. The picture even gives 19th-century reprobate Thomas De Quincey, author of the 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a writing credit—not for Opium-Eater but for a collection of hallucinatory prose poem essays, Suspiria de Profundis, specifically the one about Levana, the Roman goddess of childbirth.
As with much of the work of Italian director and cowriter Dario Argento, the plot barely matters in Suspiria because it so quickly and so often goes afield of logic or sense. Harper is Suzy Bannion, a young ballet dancer who has left the US to study at a prestigious dance academy in Freiburg, Germany. As it happens, the prestigious dance academy is actually a front for an ancient coven of witches, or something. Suzy knows things are not right there because on her arrival, near midnight of a stormy, rainy night, she witnesses a young woman flee out the front door into the nearby woods while the woman on the house intercom is telling Suzy to go away. Fortunately, Suzy asked the surly taxi driver to wait for her so at least she has a ride back into town.
These plot points just don’t matter. The next day the young woman has been found dead and police are interested in what Suzy knows. Now the people at the school seem to know who she is and are more welcoming. The murder of the night before is typical of all the violence in the movie and indeed more generally of Argento—gory and repulsive, yes, but absurdly stylized. Glass is a medium Argento has returned to repeatedly and it’s used well here too—stained glass, reflecting glass, breaking glass, sprays of glinting shards of glass. One is reminded of the Nick Lowe song, “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass” (and/or “Breaking Glass” and “Always Crashing in the Same Car” on David Bowie’s Low). The victim has been hunted down, brought back to the school, and tossed in spectacular fashion through the stained-glass skylight of the school to hang in gruesome fashion.
Suzy’s Nancy Drew / Spidey sense instincts go on high alert but she’s there to study dance and has little reason yet to think she might be in danger herself. Also, she strangely begins to feel weak, faint, and in ill health. She’s not sure what could be wrong with her. Yeah, just go along with this. Suspiria is somewhat incoherent, somewhat muddled, somewhat unlikely, always. The set pieces appear to drive the plot. For example, Argento wanted to shoot something with draped sheets, strange colored lighting, and shapes and shadows seen moving on the other side of the sheets. So he concocted an unpleasant maggot infestation (bad meat from the school’s meat supplier, it turns out), which forces the young women students to camp out dormitory style in the large practice room, surrounded by those draped sheets. It’s all perfectly effective as sensation, though maybe not so much, again, as plot point. Goblin jumps in at all the right points to elevate the sensations and vertiginous confusions.
Another example: another scene of another young woman trapped in a room, menaced by something at the door. Did I mention there is a lot of mysterious menace of unknown terrors going on here? She sees the possibility for escape in a tiny window near the high ceiling above, piles the random crates that are there in the room to climb up to the window. and throws herself into the next room. Which appears to be a storage space for large bales of loose razor wire. Don’t ask why such a thing would be in a dance academy or even a witch coven’s building. It’s just there and it cuts up the young woman pretty bad.
In the end it all burns and there’s a charmingly brisk kiss-off before the credits roll. The general overall result is that it's often hard to know exactly what in hell is going on around here in Suspiria, though ultimately that often works to the benefit of the movie. It’s best seen on as large a screen as possible because it is also best seen just giving in to the sensations. Don’t try to make sense of it. You can’t. And there’s more where this came from by Argento. Deep Red and Tenebrae are two more likely stops if you like Suspiria. But Suspiria is arguably in a class by itself, and a good starting point for Argento and perhaps even Italian giallo, a vast little subgenre if you’re inclined to dig into it.
Suzy’s Nancy Drew / Spidey sense instincts go on high alert but she’s there to study dance and has little reason yet to think she might be in danger herself. Also, she strangely begins to feel weak, faint, and in ill health. She’s not sure what could be wrong with her. Yeah, just go along with this. Suspiria is somewhat incoherent, somewhat muddled, somewhat unlikely, always. The set pieces appear to drive the plot. For example, Argento wanted to shoot something with draped sheets, strange colored lighting, and shapes and shadows seen moving on the other side of the sheets. So he concocted an unpleasant maggot infestation (bad meat from the school’s meat supplier, it turns out), which forces the young women students to camp out dormitory style in the large practice room, surrounded by those draped sheets. It’s all perfectly effective as sensation, though maybe not so much, again, as plot point. Goblin jumps in at all the right points to elevate the sensations and vertiginous confusions.
Another example: another scene of another young woman trapped in a room, menaced by something at the door. Did I mention there is a lot of mysterious menace of unknown terrors going on here? She sees the possibility for escape in a tiny window near the high ceiling above, piles the random crates that are there in the room to climb up to the window. and throws herself into the next room. Which appears to be a storage space for large bales of loose razor wire. Don’t ask why such a thing would be in a dance academy or even a witch coven’s building. It’s just there and it cuts up the young woman pretty bad.
In the end it all burns and there’s a charmingly brisk kiss-off before the credits roll. The general overall result is that it's often hard to know exactly what in hell is going on around here in Suspiria, though ultimately that often works to the benefit of the movie. It’s best seen on as large a screen as possible because it is also best seen just giving in to the sensations. Don’t try to make sense of it. You can’t. And there’s more where this came from by Argento. Deep Red and Tenebrae are two more likely stops if you like Suspiria. But Suspiria is arguably in a class by itself, and a good starting point for Argento and perhaps even Italian giallo, a vast little subgenre if you’re inclined to dig into it.
Argento did a lot of writing work with the Spaghettis before getting into directing his giallo stuff, most notably Once Upon a Time in America and the even weirder and more abstract Cemetery Without Crosses.
ReplyDeleteI don't have much of a list of death-by-glass Horror scenes to work with but I think there was a pretty shocking glass scene in The Omen. -Skip