Since their first feature AMER (2009), directing duo Helène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have released a new film every four years or so. Their films are nominated at festivals, but they mostly win in technical categories. This isn’t totally surprising. Like the recently departed David Lynch, Cattet & Forzani make very individual, intense, polarizing films. They create a homage to a film genre, concentrate and fragment the corresponding images and sounds and the narrative set pieces to create a (according to Bruno Forzani) “orgasmic“ film experience. REFLECTIONS IN A DEAD DIAMOND is inspired by the European spy thrillers of the 1960s.

On the surface, the film is about aging secret agent John D (played by Italian genre cinema veteran Fabio Testi), who is looking at the sea, drinking bitters, and thinking about his attractive (and much younger) room neighbor from his hotel room on the French riviera. His golden era is behind him on all fronts, and he’s late on his rent for the room. Then his neighbor suddenly disappears without a trace. Was she a charming fellow agent, assigned to an art collector? Or does she deal in nuclear materials? Or in oil? Though she didn't disappear without a trace: all the sequins on her dress were cameras, which she used to leave messages for John. The old John remembers his young self (Yannick Rennier) and picks up the trail. It leads to a mysterious serpentine, a deadly leather beauty who kills her victims with a poisonous ring.

But why is she as young as she is in his memory, while John is now old? Is he even a secret agent or is all of this just an illusion? Is he an actor and is what he is remembering just the plot of an old comic, like the Italian “Danger Diabolik?“ There are always hints pointing in one direction or another, only to then throw everything out the window and lead onto a completely new trail. Anyone familiar with the duo's previous films will already suspect that there won't be a conclusive explanation for what they've just seen.

Frenetically edited, with images that bask in extreme close ups and hyper-reality, while the protagonist’s breath, the buzz of a knife and the squeaking of a leather outfit mix loudly with the retro soundtrack. REFLECTIONS IN A DEAD DIAMOND is only 87 minutes long, but contains sensory impressions that, with a more leisurely approach, could fill a film at least twice as long, leaving behind a feeling of sweeping cinematic bliss.

Christian Klose

Translation: Elinor Lewy