SONNO PROFONDO – Luciano Onetti’s first film pretty much sets out the blueprint for what he did in the likes of ‘Francesca’ and ‘Abrakadabra’, which is really a fetishized take on the stock imagery and symbols of the giallo. What that boils down to cinematically is lots of shots of black gloves stroking shiny knives, close-ups of doll’s faces, old photographs, and bits of sinister architecture… the soundtrack is similarly reverent, containing familiar Italian prog tropes and that all time giallo classic, a haunting nursery rhyme. The focus on objects and the way they look rather than people and what they say / do made me wonder whether it’d been written on the sly by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and this ultra-concrete approach is so fragmenting that it makes SP seem at times more like an experimental film than a genre movie with a narrative. But one of the most surprising things about SP is that there is indeed a story, one we have to piece together as we rake through its fragments and images, leading to the lovely irony that the viewer is essentially cast in the role of one of those bumbling detectives that make gialli such a chore to sit through in the first place (for me). SP is basically giallo-as-filmic-jigsaw-puzzle. I’m sure there must be a market for actual jigsaws based on famous gialli, not that I’m in a rush to patent that one.
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