‘Reflection in a Dead Diamond’ Review: An Exquisite and Flashy Cinematic Jewel Box With Nothing Much Inside
Flaunting more leather and latex than a specialty shop off Times Square in the 1970s, Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort) is another gory, glammy, eyes-glazing-over feature from French directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani.
Indeed, both the ’70s and ’60s are eras from which the avant-garde duo have always mined their material, basking in the excesses of Italian giallo horror flicks, Z-grade Spaghetti westerns and other cult items in their arthouse rehashes, which include Let the Corpses Tan and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears. The pair’s latest plays like a forgotten Franco-Italian James Bond ripoff that’s dropped too many tabs of acid, then been slapped with a hard-R rating for its abundance of stabbings, slashings and other kinds of twisted desecrations of the human flesh.
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A bold choice for competition at the Berlinale, and clearly more fit for midnight or genre fest programs, Cattet and Forzani’s fourth feature is definitely their most ambitious work to date. It jumps constantly from past to present, from exquisitely crafted set-piece to gory killing spree, from old movie to making-of-an-old movie to some sort of alternative disco-age reality, all the while dishing out a cheesy international spy plot that isn’t exactly interesting to follow.
In terms of pure cinematic craft, the directors and regular DP Manuel Dacosse have outdone themselves this time, creating a bevy of off-the-wall images that are almost literally drilled into your retina. But that doesn’t make this taxing effort any easier to sit through: Reflection in a Dead Diamond is less a film than dozens of films at once, and they’re all so much to handle that 90 minutes often feels a dozen times longer than that.
To summarize the story as simply as possible, John Dimon (Italian veteran Fabio Testi, star of both spaghetti Westerns and classics like De Sica’s The Garden of Finzi-Continis) is a lonely 70-year-old living in a luxury hotel on the C?te d’Azur. He spots a beautiful woman on the beach — cut to a close-up of her exposed nipples pierced with diamond studs — who sparks memories of his glory days as a secret agent. When the woman disappears and eventually turns up dead, he tries to solve the mystery while his past lives come back to haunt him.
The above description is as clear as things will get for many viewers, who, if they haven’t seen a Cattet-Forzani movie before, will quickly discover that succinct storytelling is less important than bombarding us with visual tricks and film lover homages. This includes spoofing the classic Bond franchise title sequence, which they transform here into a cartoonish bloodbath where the younger Dimon (Yannick Renier) blows out the brains of his enemies, their vital fluids morphing into cascading gemstones.
Another crazy scene involves a leather-clad assassin, known as Serpentik (played by Thi Man Nguyen and several other actresses), who annihilates a gang of baddies in a casino, chopping them to pieces in a red and black set-piece that transforms into a giant blood-soaked roulette wheel. That’s followed by a scene in which an undercover opera diva (Céline Camara), who wears a mirrored dress filled with tiny recording devices, has sex with a suave oil baron (Koen De Bouw). The man drenches her body in petroleum, then uses it to make expressionist paintings that decorate his bodacious seaside villa, in what feels like an obvious nod to Goldfinger.
All of this occurs within the first 10 or 15 minutes, and if you’re not already exhausted than you have a considerable amount of patience. There’s so much extravagant and extreme imagery here that your eyeballs will want to explode — or get ripped out of their sockets and turned into ornate jewelry, which is sort of what happens at some point in the movie.
The problem is that there’s no actual point to Reflection in a Dead Diamond, which is simply another vehicle allowing Cattet and Forzani to mimic their favorite schlocky movies, deconstructing them into feats of hyper-stylized abstraction. Those feats can be impressive to behold in limited doses, but at feature-length they accumulate into a beautiful pile of film fatigue.
Kudos are nonetheless in store for a couple who continues to go boldly where few directors go, eschewing commercial or “elevated” genre filmmaking for something stranger and perhaps deeply personal. In a purely experimental way, they’re doing what Tarantino does in a mainstream sense, taking curiosa flicks from the ’60s and ’70s and turning them into chopsocky fables that are much more about cinema than reality. At a time when many people think the movies are dying, their weird and wild creations provide a unique brand of life support.
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