One in all Christopher Nolan’s most intriguing feedback on “Tenet”’s ill-fated 2020 press tour unveiled the mode of inspiration for his time-swerving spy thriller. He needed to collate the tropes of the sub-genre from his reminiscence and recollections of movie viewings previous, hoping the psychological outcomes would lead to a spy film urtext — an espionage flick composed of essentially the most profound parts of all different espionage flicks. Concluding the thought, he cited Sergio Leone’s “As soon as Upon a Time within the West” for example of the identical sort of strategy, however with traditional Hollywood westerns.
If “Tenet” was some sort of definitive arabesque on the spy film, it could make a nice double invoice at a cultured cinematheque with “Reflection in a Lifeless Diamond,” which has simply premiered in competitors on the Berlinale. Co-directed by the artsy style specialists Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the movie shuffles a myriad of spy thriller emblems, like a very deft croupier, whereas “Tenet” would prepare them like tidy, brutalist blocks that may very well be recombined at will. If these Nolan cross-references are pushing it, Cattet and Forzani certainly present themselves as updated with newer manifestations of this sub-genre (though fortunately not with “Kingsman”): its first shot of waves violently crashing a pearlescent seashore is sort of similar to the opening imagery of “Inception.”
That tiny trace of “Inception” remains to be predominantly outweighed by helpings of the leerier Connery Bonds, true 70s softcore and exploitation flicks, and the conspiratorial masks obsessions of silent French serials like “Les Vampires.” The characters swap locations, identities, ages and roles; time itself is the slipperiest “mark” for the viewers to tail, comprehend and bend again right into a hopefully linear form. Hailing from francophone Belgium, and beforehand famous for the giallo homage “Amer,” and the Spaghetti Western tribute “Let the Corpses Tan,” Cattet and Forzani’s work lives within the interstices of style pastiche and arthouse abstraction, though to their credit score and individuality, they positively don’t swimsuit the present pattern for so-called “elevated” horror. For all its aptitude, “Reflection in a Lifeless Diamond” has the pre-fabricated would-be cult enchantment that satiates and flatters style movie festivals and wider, retro B film tradition, though its placement in Berlin’s predominant competitors seems like a press release by the curators to examine what they do a bit extra significantly.
So, inspecting the plot, the administrators’ screenplay lays out two main character arcs, but with their fast-cutting visuals and offbeat découpage, telling them aside and absolutely differentiating them is a difficult activity, particularly within the first act. We’re on the Côte d’Azur, and a suave older gentleman performed by Fabio Testi is whiling away what looks as if a peachy, blissful retirement, nevertheless a lot he’s internally meditating on mysterious previous occasions by no means absolutely resolved. But as we study, he really lives in a dreamy, purgatorial interzone in a comfortable coastal lodge, the place he owes cash, we study, to indefinitely lengthen his keep. His neighbour in room 317 subsequent door has been complaining about him, and we see Testi’s character gazing at her afterward, revealing her to be a lovely, bikini-clad younger lady whose face is rarely absolutely uncovered by the digicam, and he can’t deliver himself to make an off-the-cuff conversational strategy.
An odd supply of a black envelope with gold lining introduces the dashing Yannick Renier as John Diman, a super-spy in an inexact 60s-to-70s time interval being briefed for his subsequent mission, if he chooses to simply accept it (and he does!). He groups up with a sequin dress-clad colleague code-named Moth (Céline Camara) to trace the oil billionaire Markus Strand (Koen De Bouw), making certain he stays protected from the menacing advances of the catsuit-arrayed murderer Serpentik, who’s cleverly incarnated by a number of performers (amongst them, Thi Mai Nguyen and Sylvia Camarda), as a Dr. Mabuse-like chimera of free-floating menace. However remembering the enchantment of those movies’ antagonists as extra fascinating rooting pursuits, in comparison with the oft-blander, lantern-jawed heroes, might we sympathise along with her focusing on this oligarchic determine, who perhaps deserves what’s coming to him?
Varied digicam tips, match cuts and a number of exposures reveal that Testi is enjoying an older John Diman, recalling his previous intelligence days as a youthful man. But this nonetheless doesn’t account for the numerous metafictional and cross-media slippages Cattet and Forzani apportion throughout its fairly ample 87-minute working time. The triangular define of a diamond turns into a portal by which the characters appear to grasp their important falsity: they’re being coerced themselves by malign forces from the business movie and publishing industries, the place “John Diman” is merely a cloak to inhabit, whose personal wearer has paltry interiority or substance themselves. Admittedly, that is tougher to elucidate in prose than simply to think about a lava lamp orgying with a disco ball as a bullet-time gun battle ensues, and with all these slender snippets of narrative making themselves identified in subliminal fragments.
How efficiently “Reflection in a Lifeless Diamond” works for you is based on what precise taste of style movie fan you may be. With it coming from Belgium’s polyglot movie business, and folding in Italian in addition to central European reference factors, I’ve seen the way it lights up a viewer from that area’s mind, in my post-screening chats. For an anglophone viewer like myself, it introduced a flimsier Tarantino pastiche, together with Man Maddin, to thoughts: a fetish object each embracing and laughing at this well-liked style’s tacky conventions. It usually seems lovely, but that magnificence additionally has an ostentatious high quality. In the end, it’s a working example for a way an impeccably styled arthouse-grindhouse crossover can really feel each dense with signifiers to unpack (though missing extra generally understood sorts of “depth”), but additionally fleet, frothy and enjoyable.
Grade: B
“Reflection in a Lifeless Diamond” premiered on the 2025 Berlin Movie Competition. It’s at the moment in search of U.S. distribution.
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