Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025, Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani)

63/100

Can't imagine ever being anything but excited to see Cattet & Forzani ask themselves questions like "How can we create something visually spectacular from four quick shots of a man walking down a hotel corridor, stopping at the door to his room, then glancing over at the room next to his?" (Their answer includes, for one of those four shots, cinema's most striking geometric hotel carpet since Kubrick's chosen pattern for the Overlook.) Sustaining that excitement for the duration of a feature-length narrative remains the tricky part, and I found this attempt, riffing on '60s Italian 007 ripoffs generally and Danger: Diabolik pretty specifically*, to be more successful than Strange Color of Your Body's Tears but less cohesive (arguably by design) than Let the Corpses Tan. At one point, we're seemingly nested within multiple fantasies/reveries/memories, as an elderly retired spy (Fabio Testi, whose previous most recent film appearance I'd seen was in 1978's China 9, Liberty 37) recalls a long-ago mission during the course of which our perspective shifts to someone else entirely, either remembering or imagining exploits of her own. Didn't make a lot of sense to me, but given that I'd just watched a woman murder multiple assassins by shooting every metallic spangle of her dress as if they were porcupine quills, leaving her standing naked in heels surrounded by felled bodies, does understanding really matter? The eternal question with this duo, and I laughed aloud when they introduced, mid-film, the possibility that everything we're seeing is either an actor reliving his anxiety about being replaced in Italy's most successful action franchise or a drug-induced (as I recall) hallucination that makes you think yourself in a movie. Still think the almost pure abstraction and multi-narrative structure of Amer better suited Cattet & Forzani's single-minded approach than does anything they've come up with since (excepting their short contributions to omnibus films), but convoluted meta-fictional gamesmanship has its advantages.

* Also on Italian comics called fumetti neri, apparently, but I'm unfamiliar with those and the connection's necessarily secondhand, this being a film.