James Bond-like Style Pastiche is the Rarest of Gems

“It’s false to say that the display is incapable of placing us ‘within the presence of’ the actor,” the nice French thinker André Bazin wrote in 1967. “It does so in the identical method as a mirror — one should agree that the mirror relays the presence of the particular person mirrored in it – however it’s a mirror with a delayed reflection, the tin foil of which retains the picture.”

Bazin was involved concerning the essential variations between theater and movie and between fiction and actuality, and so it appears, are the Belgian filmmakers Bruno Forzani & Hélène Cattet. With Reflection in a Lifeless Diamond, which continues their experimentation in style pastiche, the 2 study, in a hyper-focused, usually surrealist method, the ever-expanding zeitgeist of the James Bond franchise. Via John Diman (Yannick Renier and Fabio Testi, young and old, respectively), Forzani & Cattet places us “within the presence of the actor,” who in flip, maybe via dementia, maybe via countless bloody battle for state intelligence, can not discern between himself, the actor enjoying him, the books primarily based on his life (or is it the books primarily based on the character he performs) or the real article – no matter which may be. No matter mirror we’re beginning at, in Bazin-like phrases, is refracted so many instances and in such a visually resplendent method that all of it will get blended up into an exquisite, confounding kaleidoscope.

Reflection in a Lifeless Diamond Is Your Favourite Bond Movie as Relayed By Somebody with Weird, Fading Reminiscence

Regardless of the case, the movie is well Forzani & Cattet’s most startling achievement. A repeatedly shifting rubix dice which modifications form the second you assume you have figured it out, Reflections in a Lifeless Diamond is concurrently the duo’s most easily-accessible narrative and its most tutorial. After we meet Diman (Testi), whose title is curiously near each the French and English phrase for “diamond,” he’s luxuriating at a lodge on the Côte d’Azur, consuming urchins and leering at bikini-clad ladies on the seashore. His neighbor on the resort has been complaining about noise, and, in an try and spy on her, Diman makes use of an outdated gadget: a hoop with an eye fixed on it that enables the consumer to see via surfaces — however which might blind you with over-use.

The neighbor disappears shortly thereafter, and Diman is thrust right into a vortex of recollections of himself as a youthful agent (Renier) on a curious mission that might not appear misplaced within the Roger Moore period of Ian Fleming’s franchise. In spectacularly creative trend, Forzani & Cattet study a spy’s life in reverse. As an alternative of sitting alongside our suave agent as he fights the great struggle, we obtain it via a warped mind’s reminiscence: all of the lurid particulars and no matter ethical judgement he clearly has about himself.

Diman’s mission — as effectively Forzani & Cattet’s plot — is meaningless by design. Roughly talking, it appears to have one thing to do with Diman’s accountability to safeguard a diamond magnate, Markus Strand (Koen de Bouw), who, in explicitly Bond villain-like methods, is each a self-proclaimed philanthropist and soiled capitalist. His opposition is, additionally Bond-like, the shape-shifting, sexually promiscuous, blood-lusting, leather-clad martial artist Serpentik (Thi-Mai Nguyen). In the meantime, Diman’s colleague and sometime-lover (Céline Camara) struts about in a glowing silver costume whose silver sequins are expendable into slicing weaponry by way of a covert pink button, and has loyalties that are perpetually in query (not less than to us).

Like Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, it turns into more and more troublesome to inform what’s what, and that puzzle is infinitely fulfilling when you perceive that nothing is absolutely imagined to make sense on a conventional stage.

The movie’s refracting mirror doubles in on itself when the youthful Diman is thrust right into a pink carpet scene the place, certainly, “recollections and moviemaking” collide. Diman watches the playback of what seems to us to be a movie however could possibly be a mission report contained in the spy’s operation. Like Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, it turns into more and more troublesome to inform what’s what, and that puzzle is infinitely fulfilling when you perceive that nothing is absolutely imagined to make sense on a conventional stage. Nothing is grounded in actuality, and just like the genres which Forzani & Cattet ape, the following delirium is a component and parcel of the purpose. Nobody watches Diamonds are Ceaselessly for the plot; you look ahead to the set-pieces and the devices.

To make sure, Reflection in a Lifeless Diamond is much extra violent than the Bond movies, however that franchise is just one the numerous direct and oblique references at play. The palette consists of Mario Bava‘s Hazard: Diabolik, Baroque-era work by artists like Caravaggio, Kaneto Shindo’s dream-like 1964 horror Onibaba, the absurdity of the life-like masks from Mission: Not possible, to the explosive comedian artwork of Frank Miller. Forzani & Cattet are in direct dialog with this lengthy lineage of pop artwork and Eurospy, delighting within the sandbox of those genres whereas asking us to think about how we devour and discover pleasure within the cartoonish violence of the surveillance state.

With its maximalist aesthetic (excessive close-ups of beer pouring, nipple piercings, pores and skin being torn from the flesh), the movie is a delayed extension of giallo and fumetti neri, the Italian style novels and movies which imitated American and British mysteries and novels. Right here, within the theme park of hedonistic pleasures, all the world is an phantasm, much less a mirror to ourselves than an x-ray of our mind in its most imaginative state.

Shudder will completely launch Reflection in a Lifeless Diamond on Friday, December fifth, 2025.