Saturday, October 29, 2022

Sunglasses at Night

Dark Glasses (Dario Argento, 2022)

Had the naive hope that whenever a Dario Argento film would make its eventual debut on this blog, then it would have been one of his classics; such as Deep Red (1975), Suspiria (1978) or Tenebrae (1982). However, considering Argento is now in his eighties and hasn't made a film since the thoroughly detested Dracula 3D (2012), his latest film, Dark Glasses would be worth the effort just to check up on him; the sort of thing you would do whenever you're worried about an elderly neighbour.

Kicking off with a solar eclipse darkening the city of Rome, the film's high class escort heroine, Diana (Illenia Pastorelli), experiences some not so subtle forshadowing by being temporary blinded by the celestial phenomenon. After a graphic, quintessentially giallo style kill of another sex worker, the film reverts back to Diana as she flees from a physically abusive client and into a car chase with the said serial killer. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. The chase results in an impressive car crash scene, where the driver of another vehicle is left dead and his wife in a coma. The couple's son, Chin (Xinyu Zhang), sat in the back seat, winds up remarkably unscathed. Diana is left blind by the ordeal. It's from here where the film focuses on the adjustments Diana is forced to make in her life, and the guilt she feels over Chin's tragic predicament. Meanwhile, the killer is still out there and has his eyes on her.

Adapted from a script which was languishing on the back burner for at least twenty years, Argento's film feels surprisingly underdeveloped. Reliant on recycling elements from his past works for some essential substance; the most notable attempt is the rehash of Franco and Lori from The Cat O' Nine Tails (1971). However, that's an already established relationship and here it's the formation of one, and so there's an uncomfortable awkwardness while trying to find common ground. One of which results in an unintentionally comedic scene where a guilt ridden Diana visits an orphanage and gives Chin a bootleg game console to cheer him up. How wrong is that? Another obvious throwback is the dog scene from Suspiria; which lacks any real intensity here and only exists just to up the gore factor by a notch.

Worth pointing out that despite some visual flourishes here and there, harkening back to Argento's glory days, Dark Glasses is a very low budget film. It has the whiff of TV crime drama all over it. The kind that's on a Sunday night, where you're already grabbing your coat and leaving the house. Hardly a bad thing for fresh-faced film makers cutting their teeth, but Argento is a veteran and his old masterpieces have been cinematic in scope. Arguably, budgets got much lesser, hence the transition from film to television for many of Argento's peers. Ultimately, the reason why Italian horror and giallo fizzled out during the nineties and what little has been made since then resembles cheap looking tat like Argento's The Card Player (2003)

Despite its faults, there are genuine positives I like about Dark Glasses: the film has a breezy fast pace to it, which feels refreshing after all the unnecessarily long movies released nowadays; Diana is an unexpectably likeable protagonist; Asia Argento delivers a fine performance for her supporting role as Diana's carer. There's also the fact that the killer's face is revealed relatively early in the film; subverting most people's, including my own, preconceptions of the rules in gialli. Arnaud Rebotini's synthwave soundtrack is most of the time atmospherically effective whenever it doesn't stray into Euro-Techno territory. Also, the typically Argento WTF? setpieces like the water snakes scene is very well executed and one for any Argento highlights reel.

All in all, it's a decent time waster. Objectively, an average film that I would have probably forgotten about already if it wasn't for the fact that Argento has been churning out shite for decades, and this is begrudgingly his best offering since The Stendhal Syndrome (1996). Fellow octogenarian film maker, Paul Verhoeven, gave us the spectacular Benedetta (2021) last year, and Dark Glasses is nowhere near the technical nor artistic level of proficiency. Still, I would rather Argento make a back to basics giallo like this in 2022 than sully his name even further by attaching it to pretentious shite like She Will, or acting in some depressing Gaspar NoƩ film about Alzheimer's Disease this year.

Dark Glasses (Trailer)
(Dario Argento, 2022)
 

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