December 19 2025, 16:00
Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Director: Bruno Forzani, Hélène Cattet
Release year: 2025
Yikes, the plot of this one... John Diman is an old man staying at an expensive hotel on the French Riviera, but he was once a secret agent for a clandestine government organisation. He spent years trying to catch a leather-clad female assassin called Serpentik, but she evaded him to the end. Memories and reality merge as he walks the hotel grounds and wonders if Serpentik has at last come for him.
It’s rare to find a film that is so impressionistic and reliant on associations through cuts, slides and jumps of editing, that you can get almost to the end and still not be sure what exactly is going on. It jumps through time, between characters, between the actors playing characters, and more, in an exhilarating and thoughtful way. It’s a love letter to a sort of film that was everywhere in the sixties, especially in Italy—the cheap euro-spy-thriller cashing in on the popularity of the Bond films.
The camera effects and costumes and dialogue are familiar from other genres I do know, and I can’t think of anyone better to do a film like this than Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet’s, who have done a similar job with giallo (Amor) and spaghetti westerns (Let the Corpses Tan).
Serpentik is a fascinating villain (or is she?), with an ever-changing face, an array of feminine weapons (steel nails! hair hooks! poison rings! samurai swords!), and a barely concealed rage that is amusingly counter to Diman’s confused lust and professional outrage that he can’t catch her. And the ending is deliciously ambiguous.
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