Reflections in a Dead Diamond (2025)
Most recent movie by Franco-Belgian power couple Bruno Forzani and Helen Cattet. They are film makers I have more or less always ignored, which might have been a mistake on my part, because they have certainly distinguished themselves, making surreal, psychedelic pastiches of European genre cinema. This one being a send-up of James Bond, along with a variety of low budget French and Italian productions made to piggyback on the success of James Bond. Mario Bava's Diabolik being the most blatant influence here, with a dash of the Fantomas series. So, you might surmise, we are in deep European hipster shit here.
So, Reflections is about retired super spy, or perhaps super spy actor, John D. (Don't think I don't see what you did there.), played by Fabio Testi, being haunted by his past, mainly seductive transforming villainess Serpentik. It plays out as a series of hallucinatory flashbacks to his work as a secret agent intercut with his present life as a retiree in a hotel on the French Riviera, where he suspects Serpentik might be coming after him again.
The title Reflections in a Dead Diamond suggests something fractured and the movie certainly seems to take that as a model for its storytelling, which is not only nonlinear and elleptical but also layered in a way that's hard to make sense of. On face value, it's tempting to say it's about an elderly spy actor who has lost the ability to tell the details of his own life apart from those of the character he famously played and his subsequent descent into violent paranoia. Which is certainly one reading of it. One contrasted, if course, by an encounter with a super villain who makes his victims "believe they're in a movie".
There is a hint, certainly, of Inland Empire to the way it treats the role an actor plays as a prison they're trapped in, but it never establishes as openly an unambiguously metaphysical layer. It doesn't have that lynchian adventure game logic of "Receive the magic gun from the otherwordly rabbit people to shoot the Phantom and break the curse." logic. Whether John D. Is an actor who thinks he's a secret agent or a secret agent who thinks he's an actor, there is no way for him to break free, only to spiral down and follow this delirious journey to its logical conclusion.
Which isn't to say that that delirious journey isn't quite beautiful. The directors are certainly more than skilled when it comes to presenting these heightened, overly saturated remixes of genre cinema. See, there's an interesting conversation to be had here. People like to talk about invoking "dream logic" but what's so fascinating about dreams, mine at least, is that they're composed of familiar parts of your own experiences and memories, rearranged in an absurd way. It's impossible for a movie, or any other medium, to recreate the specificity of that experience, but what they can do is either rearranging the part of universally familiar experiences (which is where a big part of the whole liminal space craze comes from, utilizing slightly off-key versions of places like schools, shopping centres, public pools and other spaces most people within a certain age range and cultural background would have childhood memories from) or rearranging parts of familiar media, where the individual parts are recognizable but the way they're welded together is strange and nonsensical.
Accordingly, Reflections in a Dead Diamond is a film that, On a moment to moment basis, you feel like you can almost follow. Almost has a familiar plot, because so many familiar pieces are there. But when you look at it as a whole, the picture these pieces form just isn't quite identifiable. Which makes it rather interesting. Now, I don't think it's a great film, exactly. While it certainly tries to be short and dense, that density is almost all in its visuals. Which are brilliant, make no mistake, but the actual plot meanders and sometimes almost veers into the repetitive. Often making it feel like a series of clips and setpieces that only barely amount to a progressing narrative, even an abstract one. But make no mistake: There's a lot about Reflections in a Dead Diamond that's just really plain cool, which, for me, makes up for most of its narrative shortcomings.
