‘Reflection in a Dead Diamond’ Review: While James Bond Awaits a Reboot, French Pair Pay Eye-Popping Homage to His ’60s-Era Imitators
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then every shot in Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s cine-kaleidoscopic “Reflection in a Dead Diamond” is worth its weight in cubic zirconia. The latest eyegasm from the French couple behind “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears” continues their pop-art worship of guilty-pleasure ’60s cult cinema. This time, their primary inspiration are fumetti neri, the Italian pulp comics that launched the masked Diabolik character and a stylish (if schlocky) subgenre of crime and adventure films — mostly James Bond knockoffs with giallo-vivid visuals.
“Reflection” wonders how a life of world-saving exploits, as chronicled in cinema and comics, might look in the rearview mirror, as a Bond-like secret agent stares out at the sea and watches his life flash before him. The answer: Objects are much closer than they appear, but also splintered like so much broken glass. In just the second shot of the film, Italian actor Fabio Testi’s eyes fill the ultra-wide aspect ratio — an introduction even more dramatic (but less impactful, without proper setup or suspense) than Charles Bronson’s first appearance, gazing up from his harmonica, in “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
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Sergio Leone was a better director than the guys who made most of these movies (although genre legend Mario Bava’s 1968 “Danger: Diabolik” remains a mod delight), but it’s the entire movement’s graphically bold mise-en-scène that tickles Cattet and Forzani. Clearly, they’re also fans of kitschy spy-movie tropes, like sports cars with machine-gun headlights, “Mission: Impossible”-style rubber masks and an X-ray ring that can see through walls (and the backs of poker cards to read your opponent’s hand), all of which feature prominently. Early on, they even pay tribute to Robert Brownjohn’s iconic early-007 movie credit sequences, featuring suggestive silhouettes and footage projected on body parts.
Like Quentin Tarantino, Cattet and Forzani are pastiche artists: They’ve absorbed hundreds of obscure Europudding productions, mentally bookmarked the images and ideas that excite them and then remixed the best of those ingredients into a reverent work of homage. But they lack Tarantino’s instinct for showmanship, which elevates the B-movie grist from which his oeuvre was baked. Unlike the “Reflection” duo, he intuitively recognizes that audiences still need suspenseful storytelling and characters to care about.
Here, the dialogue is flat (and dubbed to sound slightly off, the way it always did in such films). The acting is wooden (with gifted performers, like Yannick Renier, reduced to broad-chested suit stuffing and a clenched jaw). And the plot is virtually incomprehensible.
Best guess: Testi plays former secret agent John Dimas, now in his 70s, relaxing on a rocky beach of the French Riviera. He gazes out, sees a brunette in a red bikini and orders a drink. We’re in “pure cinema” territory here, where words are kept to a bare minimum while images tell the story, each composition playing off the last: Dimas orders a beer, cut to an extreme close-up of the amber liquid being poured, match that to sea foam splashing against the woman’s skin. She removes her bikini top, leans back and the sight of a diamond nipple piercing sends him spiraling back through a career’s worth of exploits.
It takes a while to realize that Renier and Testi are playing the same person, seen at different stages in Dimas’ life. Perhaps his memory is fading, or maybe it’s all flooding back, now that he’s returned to the hotel where an oil tycoon (Koen De Bouw, whose resemblance to Renier proves confusing) he was assigned to protect was instead murdered by his nemesis, the catsuit-clad Serpentik. In a movie of deep-cut cult references, her name and style are a nod to 1968’s “Satanik.”
We learn that Serpentik was the wiliest of Dimas’ adversaries: With her spiked talons, razor-sharp nails and poison-tipped “cobra’s kiss” ring, Serpentik left a trail of corpses wherever she went. Acknowledging that no one watches James Bond imitations for the story, the “Reflection” directors focus instead on the gadgets, the gals, the retro costumes and music — and of course, the macho fantasy of a stud whose charms no woman can resist.
All that is wound up here, along with a welcome dose of self-parody, in what plays like a career-spanning super-cut. Individual sequences adhere to a certain internal logic, the way a few consecutive shots in a trailer might, while others depend on a preexisting awareness of the codes for such crime thrillers. Take the seductive colleague (Céline Camara) in the disco dress, who can push a red button and send her sequins shooting out like a thousand ninja throwing stars — that makes for a memorable set-piece but doesn’t advance the story in any way. While such sight gags amuse, the movie is so wedded to its genre that no part of it seems rooted in reality.
While Serpentik craved chaos, Dimas’ job was to maintain order, and judging by the nonlinear and largely abstract form of “Reflection,” she won — even if Dimas believed he’d defeated her decades earlier. But such rivals need one another in order to thrive, and there’s a touching dimension to the way the film demonstrates that. Bringing the many threads together toward the end, the directors incorporate fumetti pages (both hand-drawn comics and the photo-based adventure books) and a movie-within-the-movie called “Mission Infinity” (starring Hervé Sogne as the generically handsome John D.) into the postmodern smorgasbord, as “Death in Venice” meets “No Time to Die.”
Diamonds may be dazzling, but they grow tiresome to look at after a time. While the “Reflection” duo ensures that every frame sparkles, too few of them make sense.
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