Mimsy Ballistico! PERFUME OF A LADY IN BLACK (1974) + The Giallo Checklist

With one of those typically ornate giallo titles that involves 'ladies,' animal names, sharp objects, or strange jewels comes Francisco Barilli's awesome and fragrant PERFUME OF A LADY IN BLACK (a better and more apt title in my mind would be CRACKED MIRROR OF THE BLUE HIPPO). Mimsy Farmer stars as a cross between MARNIE (hallucinating her dead mom having sex with a no-good taxidermist, smiting men who'd try and sex her) and Roman Polanski in THE TENANT (living in a weird old apartment building with enough psychics, elderly sculptors, and animal totems to give anyone the willies). For audiences familiar with other conspiracy-driven ROSEMARY'S BABY-inspired psychosexual horror headtrips like 1977's American (but Italian-influenced) THE SENTINEL (my review here), it's a case of dread by association as much as anything else.

One thing I notice in all these 1970s creepshows is an admirable (or is lazy?) focus on the crux of the mise-en-scene: long takes of a woman, beautiful and in her nightgown, slowly walking, or standing still in spooky, dark, monochromatic hallways, listening to faint scraping noises. These scenes are the giallo's raison d'etre and also great way to pad running time. If the girl is truly lovely and the gown fetching, then so much the better to work the weird dissonant art/fear/desire feedback loop--we watch her watch and hear her hearing.

With her short blonde hair and Nordic resemblance to my own mother, Farmer sticks out like a sore thumb in her ancient Italian surroundings (while on the continent she was also in Dario Argento's FOUR FLIES IN GREY VELVET [my review here] and something called AUTOPSY). Her button-nose androgyny never melts all the way into either Doris Day boi's club cleanliness nor Jodie Foster baby butch grubbiness, leaving us all kind of messed up in our identification, especially as her short hair accentuates her 12 year old boy buttonnosedness, ala Jean Seberg and ROSEMARY Mia. In her perpetual pre-gender assignment limbo, we want to protect her, seduce her, fear her, and fear for her but in the end can only watch her... dissolve.. as she waits in that hallway, listening to more of that infernal... scraping...

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There's a lot of extraneous detail here that seems to be checking off some long lost giallo / Satan movie checklist rather than cohering into a narrative, so I thought for fun I'd include it here, along with the symbolic meaning of each. Note that I mean this list in only the best ways and it's not meant as disrespect to LADY IN BLACK or anything else. Gialli need these items, like old dark house movies need guys in ape suits, scheming heirs, secret panels, thunder cracks, and wheelchair-bound Egyptologists:

THE GIALLO CHECKLIST:

1. Old photos (descent into the past)

2. Taxidermy (necrophilia)

3. Winding Staircase (descent into the unconscious!

4. Music box (lost innocence)

5. Eccentric neighbor (red herring)

6. Chain lock (weak repressive mechanism)

7. Elderly doorman and Cat lady relating tragic news in foyer (exposition)

8. Abandoned building where a childhood trauma occurred. (readymade set)

9. Blind psychic (fatalism)

10. Mimsy Farmer, or facsimile (cute androgynous question mark)

Many giallo features usually on the checklist are unfortunately lacking in PERFUME OF A LADY IN BLACK, however, such as grisly murders. The one main murder here occurs offscreen! We hear about it second hand (see item 7) and that doesn't make a lick of sense! Also missing: a mustachioed, weary cop in a white trench coat, with piercing blue eyes. There are some giallo extra credit items: tennis club, Marlboro lights, graveyard, trippy architecture, VERTIGO flower shop, shadowy sects, graphic primal scene flashbacks, mysterious pasts, and a shock/twist ending.


And the DVD from Raro Video is gorgeous! Clearly a lot of time and effort was spent getting the colors deep and hallucinatory bold ala Argento's DEEP RED and SUSPIRIA. It's not quite as great as those films, but in its own private Roma way, it's awesome. So when you're out of Argento and early Polanski but still on that crazy dark color mod Euroinsane hottie kick, heighten your senses and learn to enjoy one of the more opaque of giallo-jewels, PERFUME OF A LADY IN BLACK, a nutty future classic, bound to appreciate on repeat Halloween viewings.