The Stendhal Syndrome
(La Sindrome di Stendhal, 1996)

Dario Argento

Italy

113 min, color, English

Review © 2006 Branislav L. Slantchev

This film may not be among Argento fans' favorites, but it is a solid piece of work that showcases the budding talents of Asia Argento despite the occasional thorough hamming of her scenes. As a movie that puts "psycho" back in "psychological thriller," The Stendhal Syndrome is not really a giallo despite the profuse and imaginative blood-letting. It is a brutal film that may make Tarantino weep with unrequited envy, and the interesting twist in the middle of the film elevates it above the typical hunt-for-serial-rapist-killer fare.

Anna at the gallery	"I liked you with your lip bleeding"

Anna Manni is a detective with the Rome PD who has traveled to Florence to follow up on an anonymous tip about the whereabouts of a serial rapist who has murdered several women in both cities. She has been told that the guy will be at a local art museum and (for no fathomable reason as far as I can tell) Anna is going there by herself even though she has no idea what her target looks like. While at the museum, she is overcome by her entirely too emotional perception of the stunning artwork surrounding her. She transports herself into the paintings, experiences them on an almost physical level, and faints. This is the eponymous "Stendhal syndrome," although my understanding is that Stendhal did not actually claim to have visited the worlds represented by the art.

The famous shot through the cheeks	Anna about to experience alternate reality

This sets up Anna's psychological imbalance that the killer is going to prey upon. And it soon becomes quite clear who the perp is: helpful young Alfredo (Thomas Kretschmann). He breaks into Anna's room during her bout with partial amnesia resulting from her passing out at the museum. He overpowers her, slices her lower lip with a razor blade (apparently seeing her with a bleeding lip at the museum really turned him on), rapes her, and then bludgeons her into unconsciousness. She awakes in a car next to another women being raped by him. As he climaxes, he fires a bullet through the unknown woman's face, and then peeps through the tunnel, causing Anna to flee in understandable hysteria.

You are still our best detective	So you'd like to have sex?

At this point, the film is nothing more than a run of the mill crazed rapist B movie despite the clever violence and the somewhat unusual affliction of the main heroine. But then it turns into something far more involved as Anna attempts to deal with her brutalization. She cuts her hair and begins to behave like a man. She dumps her earnest boyfriend, and fellow cop, Marco (Marco Leonardi) in an excruciatingly humiliating scene in which she pretends to butt-fuck him ("fuck him like a man," as she claims) when he fesses up to missing sex with her. She is back on the force but she also sees a shrink with whom she attempts to understand what is happening to her. She seems to be trying to shed her femininity in order to negate Alfredo's power over her.

This is caress is going to leave a scar	Anna at the mercy of the psychopath

But Alfredo is not done. He kidnaps Anna, tortures her, and rapes her repeatedly. But this time he miscalculates and she manages to free herself long enough to stab him in the neck, she then shoots him, gauges out one of his eyes, and dumps his broken body in the rapids of the nearby river. This is the place where the typical serial killer film will end, but it is barely half of Argento's offering. When the police is unable to recover the body, Anna is convinced that Alfredo has somehow survived, beaten the odds, and she has no doubt that he will be back for more. She tries to reconstitute some semblance of a normal life, falls for a French guy, and then all hell breaks loose once again.

Gratuitous shot of Asia Argento	Not counting situps

As a study of one person's desperate flight from reality in an attempt to overcome a severe psychological trauma symbolized by physical scars, Argento's film is truly a marvel. Anna's descent into a realm of an alternate reality (made possible because of her Stendhal syndrome which she apparently has had since childhood) where she is not a victim of a cruel psychopath is just the beginning of a journey that will eventually transform her into something else entirely. As she flees from victimhood, she ends up on the opposite side of the mirror as the victimizer. She has so thoroughly succeeded in eliminating the horrible scars Alfredo inflicted on her that she believes herself to have inflicted them.

Revenge is a dish best served stabbed, shot, and drowned	Hiding the mark of the killer

Asia's performance is solid, especially toward the end where the disintegration of her original personality is nearing completion. She is quite convincing in carrying the point of the film: that in the struggle to survive as a inviolate individual, a person may surrender her self and retreat into a universe where her new persona is the one dispensing horror rather than receiving it.

Anna having totally lost it	He is still inside me

The Troma DVD is atrocious. Leaving aside the truly annoying self-indulgent "introduction" to Dario's film by the director of such Z-grade schlock as the Toxic Avenger, the presentation is subpar in every respect. The video is letterboxed at 1.66:1 and the lack of anamorphic enhancement is the least of its problems. Colors are muted and their lifelessness is only underscored by the transfer that manages to be soft and grainy at the same time. The sound is lackluster and there are no English subtitles for the Italian dub of the film (although that last did not bother me all that much: the English dub seems to have been the intended one). There are two interviews with Dario and a bunch of useless promotion extras for other Troma releases. This film should definitely see a transfer it deserves.

February 10, 2006