The Belgian genre stylists Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet make disorienting yet deliriously dazzling homages to European pulp thrillers of the ‘60s and ‘70s; their filmmaking can be relied upon to ravish the eye with all manner of perverse imagery, even if there’s an assaultive quality to their school of pastiche tour-de-force that leaves the other senses completely scrambled.
That’s by design. Beyond sincerely imitating the filmmakers they worship (especially Italian masters like Dario Argento, Sergio Martino, and Mario Bava), Cattet and Forzani have steadily refined a postmodern aesthetic of their own by filtering the iconography of their influences through a prism of heightened stimulation. Intermingling pleasure with dread, their films are characterized not only by the arresting quality of their hyper-stylized sounds and images but also by dizzyingly associative editing rhythms that abstract narrative and near-orgiastically emphasize the power of purely audio-visual experience.
Cattet and Forzani’s first two features, “Amer” and “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears,” reveled in the sensory overkill of Italian giallo horror films, while their third, “Let the Corpses Tan,” made a similarly eye-popping spectacle of spaghetti Westerns. “Reflection in a Dead Diamond,” the duo’s giddily metacinematic latest (now streaming on Shudder), finds them casting an appreciative gaze across the Eurospy subgenre, popular in the late ’60s, with its outré gadgetry, pop-psychedelic color schemes, and latex-clad supervillains, as well as the fumetti neri—violent, eroticized Italian comics—that often inspired them.
The film opens at a lavish seaside hotel in Côte d’Azur, where retiree John Diman (Fabio Testi) is drinking away his later years. One day, ogling a bikini-clad young woman sunbathing along the French Riviera, his gaze alights on her diamond nipple piercing; glittering brilliantly in the sun, the object suddenly triggers his memories of a glamorous past, one in which he was a suave superspy tangled up in a web of international intrigue, beset on all sides by beautiful women and dastardly villains.
Whether this old man’s recollections are the stuff of flashback or fantasy is left deliberately ambiguous; it’s entirely possible, Cattet and Forzani tease, that Diman is an actor who only played a spy in the movies, or perhaps not even that. “Reflection in a Dead Diamond” rapidly draws the audience inside this character’s headspace, past and present collide, and fiction blurs into reality. As Diman searches for answers through his fragmented memories, he becomes hopelessly lost in a seemingly infinite, potentially inescapable hall of mirrors, each reflective surface refracting back at him a man with a different face.
Played by Yannick Renier, the younger, Bond-esque Diman is involved in a dangerous mission to protect an oil magnate (Koen De Bouw), though that initial assignment soon gives way to a byzantine assemblage of masked killers, car chases, double-crosses, dead lovers, stolen diamonds, and film-within-a-film constructs, all recalled at such high velocity—and in such nonlinear fashion—that viewers would be better-advised to surrender to the film’s innate slipperiness than attempt to completely parse its narrative. The elusive nature of John’s true identity is compounded further by the creeping insinuation of memory loss and doubled in the form of Serpentik (Thi Mai Nguyen), a deadly assassin with red metal fingernails who’s capable of assuming anyone’s appearance while concealing her true face. Soon, John’s seeing Serpentik in every woman he meets, and she becomes the ultimate object of his obsession.
Most indebted to Bava’s fumetti adaptation “Danger: Diabolik,” with its pop-art aesthetic, chaotically surreal tone, and somewhat inconsequential storyline, Cattet and Forzani’s espionage psychodrama serves up one imaginative sequence after another, frequently delighting in optical illusions and filling its frames with eye candy of every possible variety. In one characteristic sequence, a woman in a chain-disc dress reveals that all its shimmering circles function both as cameras and deadly projectiles, each piece of her outfit flying off her body to lay waste to the army of assassins that surrounds her.
Besides paying euphoric tribute to another genre that they clearly adore, Cattet and Forzani seem more confident than ever here in staging elaborate action sequences, bringing to breakneck car chases and brutal bar fights the same sleight of hand, point-precise construction, and maximalist sheen that’s governed their work to date. This is a hypnotic, invigorating film, and a step up for the duo—much like the diamonds that shimmer so seductively through their frames, it has a cold, bright, gem-like brilliance.
