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Synopsis: There is a knock on the
door of the house of Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett), caretaker of
the Buffalora cemetery. Outside stands a man who is wearing a suit and
carrying a briefcase, and who is very dead. Dellamorte shoots the
intruder through the head, and then returns to an interrupted phone-call
from his friend, Franco (Anton Alexander), telling him that, you know,
life goes on.... Dellamorte calls for his strange, near-mute assistant,
Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), and the two re-bury the body. Suddenly,
another grave nearby erupts and a second corpse rises, stalking
menacingly towards them. Dellamorte grabs the spade from the terrified
Gnaghi and splits the corpse’s skull. Later, Dellamorte ponders this
strange epidemic, which sees what he calls “Returners” rising from their
graves within seven days of death, and wonders whether it is happening
anywhere but his cemetery – and why anyone would want to
return. The next day, Dellamorte observes a funeral for an elderly man,
and is stunned by the sight of a young woman in black (Anna Falchi), the
most beautiful living woman that he has ever seen. When the woman
returns to replace the flowers on the grave, Dellamorte sympathises with
her over the loss of her father – only to have her hiss that the dead
man was her husband. Dellamorte goes into town to collect his
wages. Franco advises him to alert the mayor about the Returners, but
Dellamorte, hearing how much paperwork would be involved, decides that
it’s easier to just go on shooting them. As Dellamorte leaves the town
hall, he is subjected to catcalls from some of the townspeople, who mock
his rumoured impotence. The woman returns once again to the cemetery,
but Dellamorte’s attempts to talk to her go from bad to worse. Finally,
desperate for something, anything, to say to her, he blurts that
the cemetery has a remarkable ossuary – and this does the trick. The
woman begs to see it, excitedly caressing the remains and their tattered
shrouds. Then, casting a veil over Dellamorte’s head, she kisses him
passionately – until suddenly she breaks away and runs from him, sobbing
that she cannot be unfaithful. That night, however, she returns, weeping
as she confesses her passion for Dellamorte. The two begin to make love
on her husband’s grave – but in the grave, the corpse’s eyes
suddenly open.... The woman screams as her late husband tears open her
upper arm with his teeth. Dellamorte snatches up a cross from a nearby
grave and drives it through the corpse’s head. He then carries the woman
into the house, swearing that nothing will separate them, not even
death.... Dr Verseci (Clive Riche) reports that the cause of the woman’s
death was fear, not the bite wound, and that she died while making love.
Marshall Straniano (Mickey Knox), the investigating officer, chuckles
that, in that case, Dellamorte cannot be responsible. He adds
that since the woman had no family, the body can remain at the cemetery.
In the ossuary, Dellamorte watches over his lost love’s body, praying
that she does not become a Returner....but the shrouded figure begins to
move....
Comments: A bizarre rumination on
life and death, love and hate, and those exceedingly grey areas that
lurk in between, Michele Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore is the kind
of film that leaves you torn between shaking your head in mystification
at the fact that it was ever made in the first place, and being
enormously heartened by the fact that it was; that somewhere, some time,
a few brave souls had enough nerve to throw themselves with such obvious
enthusiasm into a work so profoundly uncommercial. Dellamorte
Dellamore almost defines the expression cult movie, inasmuch
as it is impossible to categorise. Is it an art film about zombies? – or
a film about zombies executed with great artistry? Is it a black
comedy....or a political satire....or a gore film....or a love story? It
is, in fact, none of these things entirely, and all of them by turns. It
makes bad jokes when it should be at its most serious, and grinds to a
halt for a little philosophy when the story most cries out for action.
Go into this film with expectations of any kind, and it is likely they
will be disappointed. Go with none at all, and you just might find
yourself enjoying what is – whatever else it is – one extremely
wild ride.
While one would hesitate to recommend
Dellamorte Dellamore to anyone – that’s the kind of act that can
ruin friendships, or possibly get you killed – it would perhaps be safe
to say that the people most likely to enjoy it are those well-versed in
the history of Italian horror – as Michele Soavi himself clearly is.
Soavi belongs to the third wave of Italian horror directors, and credits
those of the second wave – specifically, Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava
and Aristide Massaccesi – as his mentors.
Dellamorte Dellamore, however, is a work whose roots may be found in
the very dawn of Italian horror, combining the thematic audacity of
films such as Riccardo Freda’s L’Orrible Segreto Del Dr Hichcock
with the visual poetry of almost everything photographed or directed by
Mario Bava. (Conversely, it is, I think, fair comment to say that
Dellamorte Dellamore reflects its ancestry also in its blithe
disregard of such niceties as a structured plot, or logical story
progressions.) Nevertheless, it is a more recent, and non-Italian,
influence that is most deeply felt throughout this film. Soavi’s other
great cinematic tutor was Terry Gilliam, for whom he shot second unit on
The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen. Gilliam’s fingerprints are
all over this film, particularly in the extravagance of its imagery –
and even more so in the sense gained of Soavi’s pleasure in that
extravagance, purely for its own sake. The scene in which the Grim
Reaper manifests himself out of the swirling ashes of Francesco
Dellamorte’s bonfire and sits down for a little chat about their
respective professional demarcations is unmistakably Gilliam-esque.
But there is
another level at which Terry Gilliam’s sensibilities are at work in
Dellamorte Dellamore, and that is in the film’s satirical portrayal
of the community of Buffalora. Well – perhaps “community” isn’t quite
the right word here: that could imply a town where people have
normal interactions. Dealing each night with the newly risen undead,
Francesco Dellamorte wonders why they should be coming back in his
cemetery. We, the outside observers of Buffalora, have no doubt. If here
we never reach the extremities of
Brazil’s depiction of a
Thatcherite hell, Buffalora is quite sufficiently disturbing – and
funny. The town is the most stifling of bureaucracies. The office of
Dellamorte’s friend, Franco, is a bewildering maze of files and folders,
and there is paperwork to cover every possible eventuality – even the
existence of the living dead. Literally everyone is a part of “the
system”: the first of the Returners with whom we see Francesco
Dellamorte deal appears to us in full office regalia, right down to the
briefcase in his hand. The mayor, who presides over this straitjacketed
existence, is a single-minded opportunist whose main reaction to the
gruesome death of his daughter is to try and figure out how best to make
political mileage out of it. (“How about....‘Vote for a man who has
lost all other happiness’?”) The local police force, meanwhile, is
headed by a man who hears only what his superiors want him to hear (“Did
you hear that?” the mayor cries when his dead daughter calls out to him.
“I don’t know....it depends,” responds the Marshall cautiously), and
whose thinking runs so completely upon pre-defined rails that he is
literally unable to see what is right before his eyes. (Having made up
his mind that Dellamorte is not guilty of a wave of murders
throughout Buffalora, the Marshall doesn’t even blink when he sees him
walking away from the scene of a hospital massacre with a smoking gun in
his hand. “You’ve got a gun? Good thinking! – you’ll be able to defend
yourself!”) In such a place, where the living grow ever more moribund,
why should we be surprised to see the dead grow ever more lively? Small
wonder that, as our story progresses, Francesco Dellamorte should have
increasing difficulty in telling the two states apart.
Small wonder,
too, perhaps, that Dellamorte has withdrawn himself from most human
interaction, contenting himself with delivering cod-philosophical
lectures on the meaning of life to the unfortunate Gnaghi (whose main
qualification as Dellamorte’s chosen companion seems to be that he
cannot interrupt him), and with rambling phone conversations with
Franco, who is as dissatisfied with his existence as Dellamorte himself.
(When the two men meet face to face, though, they have little to say to
one another.) Surrounded on all sides by literal death, Dellamorte is
barely conscious of his own spiritual stagnation....until the moment
when everything changes, when he first catches sight of – She.
Given, however,
that his first glimpse of the woman who will simultaneously give meaning
to and utterly destroy his life is accompanied by the observation that
she is the most beautiful living woman that he has ever seen, we
must be exceedingly wary about taking lessons in love from Francesco
Dellamorte – even lessons in amour fou. On the other hand,
Dellamorte’s attempts to strike up an acquaintance with the object of
his obsession are an object lesson in what not to do; and if we
needed any proof of just how divorced from reality our anti-hero really
is (and even so early in this film, we really don’t), we have it in the
fact that that Dellamorte tries to impress the woman by telling her he
has a degree in biology!! (It’s a lie, by the way.) Then again---
As pick-up lines go, I suppose that one is no more ridiculous than the
one that actually works: “The cemetery’s small, but it has a
marvellous ossuary!”
“An ossuary!?”
breathes the Widow.
And so begins
one of the screen’s most perverted romances, one as comical as it is
horrifying – and one that, as we are aware, even if Dellamorte is
not, is doomed from the outset. There are, after all, certain rules that
it is wise to follow when pursuing forbidden love, the first one
being not to have sex in the cemetery where your lover’s recently
departed spouse is buried. Or, if you do have sex in the cemetery where
her spouse is buried, don’t do it right on his grave. Or, if you
do do it right on his grave, at least make sure you’re not in the
kind of cemetery where the dead regularly come back to life.
But if you do choose to ignore all these
admonitions, then at least have the grace not to look surprised when the
irate undead spouse climbs out of his grave and starts biting chunks out
of your lover.
While to this point the viewer of
Dellamorte Dellamore is invited to see its events, no matter how
incredible, as reality, from this moment onwards we must be extremely
cautious how we interpret what we see. Even as Dellamorte sits by his
lover’s body, praying that she might not become a Returner, we see him
doze off....and indeed, there is a distinct possibility that
everything beyond this point is simply a figment of Dellamorte’s
increasingly deranged imagination.
Mind you, it is a derangement that is
entirely understandable: in rapid succession, Dellamorte shoots his
lover when she sits up in the ossuary; buries her; regains her when she
rises from the dead; loses her again when Gnaghi splits her skull with a
shovel; and then realises that if she returned a second time,
then she couldn’t have been dead the first time – that is,
when he shot her.
Oops.
And even that isn’t the end of it. In the
aftermath of a horrific traffic accident that wipes out most of the
youthful population of Buffalora, Dellamorte must deal with the rising
of an undead biker and his tryst with his distraught, still-living
girlfriend. Dellamorte ignores the girl’s pleas for her lover’s, um,
life, and shoots the biker through the head – only for the bullet to
pass right through and kill the girl as well....leaving a stunned
Dellamorte to ponder the difference in likely consequences to himself
from killing the living rather than the dead. (As it turns out, he
needn’t have worried: if anyone even notices that the girl has
disappeared, we never hear from them.) It is against this background
that the Grim Reaper turns up, to admonish the caretaker for re-killing
the dead – his dead – and to suggest that if he doesn’t like the
dead coming back to life, then he should go on shooting the living in
the head – thereby cutting out the middle-man. Dellamorte acts upon this
advice, choosing for his victims a group of young men given to
ridiculing him for his supposed sexual impotence. Dellamorte makes no
effort to conceal his responsibility for the slaughter, only to have
Marshall Straniano declare him innocent of it, on the grounds that if he
is incapable of having sex, he must be incapable of....well, just about
everything else.
The unspoken joke in all this is that the
source of the false rumour of Dellamorte’s impotence is almost certainly
Dellamorte himself – one more excuse for avoiding interaction with the
living. As with most things that Dellamorte does, his choice here has an
entirely unexpected outcome when he finds himself pursued by a young
woman whose sexual phobia means she can only love an impotent man; a
young woman who bears a striking resemblance to Dellamorte’s lost
love....
Dellamorte Dellamore takes a
particularly distasteful turn here. Convinced that he can only hold onto
this reincarnation of his dead lover by being truly sexually incapable,
Dellamorte takes steps to make himself so. (This plot twist seems to
have been lifted from what may be the best of the Tod Browning-Lon
Chaney collaborations, The Unknown – although it is executed here
with none of its model’s subtlety, and is therefore not half so
disturbing. [Or at least, so I think. Male viewers are free to
feel otherwise.]) No sooner has Dellamorte taken this drastic action,
however, than the girl reappears to announce that she has been “cured”
of her phobia – by being raped – and liking it.
There is no doubt that the film is skating
on some very, very thin ice here....but we must keep in mind that by
this stage of the story, everything we see is being filtered through
Francesco Dellamorte’s crumbling sanity. For all that he nurses a tragic
romantic vision of himself, Dellamorte doesn’t actually want a real
relationship with a real woman – hence the fact that his dream girl (who
has not yet finished reappearing) only ever manifests herself as
different versions of “the unobtainable”. After showing up as a widow,
as frigid, and as a corpse (and in this universe, the fact that the
object of his desires is dead is, quite frankly, the least of
Dellamorte’s romantic worries), the woman’s final appearance as a
literal prostitute is disappointing in its inevitability – although not
without its comic side. Blind to the facts that are so obvious to the
viewer, Dellamorte is shattered to find that the consummation of his
grand passion comes with a price-tag. Asked by the woman’s roommate for
100,000 lira, Dellamorte utters numbly, “But – she said she loved
me!” “Oh – that’s 150,000,” responds the pragmatic roommate. By this
time, however, Dellamorte has learned how to deal with those who let him
down....
No, it is certainly not Francesco
Dellamorte to whom we must look for guidance in matters of the heart.
There is such a guide to be found in Dellamorte Dellamore,
though....perhaps the most unlikely one imaginable. Although this film
is a wonderful vehicle for the young Rupert Everett, who perhaps never
gave a better performance, there are times when it is almost stolen from
him by the marvellous comic performance of François Hadji-Lazaro, who
manages the not inconsiderable task of making Gnaghi utterly repulsive
and entirely lovable all at the same time. Through various throwaway
shots and scenes, the viewer learns that there is a great deal more to
Gnaghi than initially meets the eye, the underlying joke being that
everyone seems to realise it except Gnaghi’s supposed best
friend, who keeps him around chiefly, we suspect, so that he will always
have someone at hand to whom he can feel superior. The two co-inhabit
the house that comes with their jobs at Buffalora cemetery, with
Dellamorte occupying all the upper rooms, and Gnaghi a windowless
basement. From a psychological perspective, it can be seen that the two
are fragments of a single fractured personality, with Gnaghi in his
underground room the Id, and Dellamorte, up in the open, the Ego; this
relationship is even more evident in the film’s infamous closing
moments.
While Dellamorte philosophises endlessly
about life and love, Gnaghi goes about finding them, the latter in the
shape of the mayor’s doomed daughter, Valentina Scanarotti.
Unfortunately for Gnaghi, the only way he can express his affection for
Valentina is by throwing up on her. (One wonders if this was the
inspiration for Stan Marsh’s similar romantic affliction in South
Park.) Valentina takes this in surprisingly good part, however,
before jumping onto the back of the motorcycle of Claudio the biker, the
two riding off to meet their destinies by colliding with a bus full of
boy scouts. Buffalora cemetery being what it is, Gnaghi knows very well
that it is only a matter of time before Valentina is up and around
again. Impatience gets the better of him, however, and he opens
Valentina’s grave and tries to lift her out of it – but only succeeds in
pulling off her head. Not to worry. The head is very glad to see Gnaghi,
inviting him to kiss it....and the two, in the first flush of love, take
up residence in the basement room. What ensues is one of the strangest,
the sweetest, and, God help us, the most convincing romances
in....well, certainly in the history of the horror movie. Never mind
Francesco Dellamorte and his obsession with a physically exquisite
exterior: it is Gnaghi and Valentina who understand what really matters.
True love is, after all, true love; and if it dawns between a
maladjusted near-mute man-child and a zombiefied severed head, well,
what can the rest of us do but be properly envious? Alas, however, this
being the kind of film that it is, it all ends in tears....and severed
jugular veins....and bullets through the head.
(By the way – what is it with the
Italians and flying zombie heads?? Oh, well, I guess they’re not as bad
as the Balinese....)
Dellamorte Dellamore is – as you
have probably gathered by now – a very uneasy blending of content and
styles. While certain viewers might be attracted to the film by this
very quality, it seems likely that more of them will be put off by its
refusal to settle into being any one kind of story. The grue content
might also be too much for the casual observer, although it must be said
that the gore effects are, for the most part, singularly unconvincing.
(I’m particularly fond of the newly undead boy scout whose head explodes
in a puff of sawdust.) The film’s screenplay is also problematical,
being ultimately more a series of set-pieces than a coherent whole; but
if those fragments never really come together, individually they are
never less than compelling – and frequently very funny. There is plenty
of talk about sex in this film, but for all that, one of the most
remarkable things about the screenplay of
Dellamorte Dellamore is its mastery of what you might call the
triple entendre: that is, it keeps looking like it’s setting
itself up for a dirty joke, but the punch line never eventuates. Thus,
Gnaghi’s relationship with Valentina’s severed head is as chaste and
delicate as it well could be; while the teenage girl who declaims
indignantly that she’ll be eaten by whoever she chooses does indeed have
her undead boyfriend chowing down on her arm. Best of all, though, is
the Widow’s breathy reading of the line, “You know – you have a real
nice ossuary,” which sounds so salacious in context that it takes
you a while to realise it actually isn’t.
But in the end,
what really bothers people about Dellamorte Dellamore is not its
erratic script (this is, after all, an Italian horror film), or
its violence, or its sexual content, or its zombies, but that the film
has – or seems to have – the temerity to demand to be taken
seriously. It is this, I think, that so often sees the film dubbed
pretentious; well, this, plus an ending that seems carefully devised
to drive as many people as possible into screaming frustration.
Personally, I don’t mind at all if some of Life’s Big Questions come to
us courtesy of an Italian zombie film. Where I baulk is at being
asked to take at face-value the philosophical meanderings of Francesco
Dellamorte.
But are we
really meant to do so? In fact, Dellamorte’s personal creed is as
horrifyingly destructive as it is hilarious – more so, because he seems
intent not just on going, but taking everyone he can down with him.
After Gnaghi has lost Valentina once and for all, Dellamorte tries to
console him with the observation that the world is full of girls like
that. “And most of them have bodies,” he adds, proving conclusively just
how thoroughly he has misunderstood everything that has been going on –
or rather, how incapable he is of seeing anything from any perspective
but his own. This is appallingly evident also in his dealings with
Franco, when the latter complains to him of dissatisfaction with his
life. “You’ll see, Franco: Maria is going to get tired of you, and
Cinzia will grow up to hate you – and then you’ll be free!” Yet
when he later hears that Franco has murdered his wife and daughter, he
hardly even reacts, being more concerned with Franco’s appropriation via
false confession of three of his murders. “What kind of fucking
friend do you think you are?” Dellamorte demands aggrievedly of the man
who lies comatose after a suicide attempt, taking his feelings out by
blowing the brains out of three strangers unfortunate enough to wander
into the hospital room. In his own sick way, Dellamorte is a worse
infection than that usually spread by a zombie’s bite.
(It is, in any
case, rather hard to take Francesco Dellamorte seriously – and, by
extension, the film that contains him – when the “philosopher” at whose
feet he seems to have studied most is Marvin the Android! [“The
living.... Don’t talk to me about the living!”])
Francesco
Dellamorte is, then, not a guide, but a grim warning. His self-obsession
has taken him completely away from the possibility of a normal life,
normal relationships. Like Narcissus himself, Dellamorte has gazed so
long, not at his own reflection, but into his own naval, that he has at
length fallen in. His existence, like the ending of the film itself, is
a reminder that too much time spent pondering life rather than living
it, leads nowhere but up a dead end – literally as well as
metaphysically.
Want a
second opinion of Dellamorte Dellamore? Visit
Stomp
Tokyo.
CEMETERY MAN
[Dellamorte Dellamore] – available
on DVD through Anchor
Bay Entertainment.
Running
time: 99 minutes
Aspect
ratio: 1.66, 16x9 enhanced
Audio:
English Dolby Digital 5.1 and English Dolby 2.0 Surround
Extras:
·
8-page souvenir booklet
·
Death Is Beautiful:
the story behind Dellamorte Dellamore
·
Michele Soavi biography
·
Italian theatrical trailer
Comments:
Too long missing in action, Michele Soavi’s magnum opus is
another welcome release from Anchor Bay (even though one must deplore
the company’s decision to go with the film’s thuddingly unimaginative
English-language title, Cemetery Man, rather than the
appropriately poetic Dellamorte Dellamore). The picture quality
is upon the whole very good, although there is some loss of detail in
the night time scenes; a pity, because the cinematography and production
design of this film are both exquisite. The film has been released in
its English-language version only, a decision vindicated by the fact
that Rupert Everett is allowed to speak with his own voice: Everett’s
deadpan delivery is one of the film’s comic joys. An absence of closed
captioning, however, is disappointing.
The
accompanying featurette, Death Is Beautiful, is chiefly of use
for untangling the film’s exceedingly complicated genesis, and making
clear the often mis-credited relationship between Tiziano
Sclavi’s comic, Dylan Dog, this film, and Rupert Everett. It also
spends some time on the early career of Michele Soavi, and includes
interviews with screenwriter Gianni Romoli, special effects designer
Sergio Stivaletti and actress Anna Falchi, as well as with Michele Soavi
himself. The text biography of Soavi covers some of the same ground, but
goes into more detail about his early life and collaborations.
Material for this review generously
provided by Anchor
Bay Entertainment. Special thanks to Jacqueline. |
