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| la terza madre premiere | |||||||||||||
| Here is an exclusive report from Alan Jones with some pictures. Alan Jones writes: Hi Nick, Back from Rome and the 'unofficial' LA TERZA MADRE premiere which took place 10.45 pm on Halloween, October 31, at the Adriano cinema in the Piazza Cavour. It was star Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni who reminded me that we were all at the same place 20 years before for the OPERA premiere. Tempus fugit and all that! The performance was more like a cast and crew screening with everyone in attendance - Dario, Asia, Claudio Argento, Coralina, writers Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch, Sergio Stivaletti, dialogue coach Lynn Swanson, demon Robert Donati and Claudio Simonetti's sister Simona (credited as co-writer, along with director of photography Frederic Fasano, on the Italian poster with Dario, Jace and Adam for quota purposes). Just before the film began, Dario and Asia introduced with Asia asking everyone who had seen SUSPIRIA and INFERNO. No shock the whole audience raised hands. She then told a story from the Florence premiere the previous night. She and Dario were eating in a restaurant as the film screened. Suddenly someone tapped on the restaurant window and shouted it was the most disgusting film they'd ever seen. The best review they could have she said. Coralina was then introduced to the audience and all three took their seats as the film started. Incidentally, the interval in the 14-rated Italian version comes during the Udo Kier (exorcist Padre Joannes) episode.
Getting the widest Italian release an Argento film has had in decades - 313 prints - All Souls Day was chosen because it is an important holiday date with most people taking the four day weekend time off from work and going to the cinema. The black and red poster depicting Asia's shocked face was everywhere - on billboards, buses, T-shirts and in a major newspaper campaign. I didn't see any fotobusteri on the streets. They are apparently very rare and I only managed to get one set myself. They feature Asia with a photo of Daria and herself as a baby (one of the best examples of how autobiographical the film is in many personal respects); a portrait of Philippe Leroy (Gugliemo De Witt); Asia in the pit of body parts (so PHENOMENA!) and a sparsely populated climactic witch ritual featuring the Mother of Tears (Moran Attias). As to the film itself, well, it's not the conclusion to the SUSPIRIA and INFERNO trilogy any of us wanted to see. You know the story by now. The discovery of an ancient urn near a Viterbo cemetery awakens the cruel Mater Lacrimarum whose emergence unleashes apocalyptic social breakdown and mass murder in Rome. Art restorer Sarah Mandy can vanquish the evil nemesis if she listens to the guiding spirit of her mother and unlock her own hidden supernatural powers.
While it's easy to criticise LA TERZA MADRE (occasionally different to the US MOTHER OF TEARS version) for what it isn't rather than what it actually is - a gory, campy supernatural romp - the main problem with the film is simple. The layers of ethereal artifice given by lush cinematography and arch style to the prior two classic films lent their fractured stories a further atmosphere of palpable fever dream unreality. Stripped of that, and saddled with Fasano's dull realism (his DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK photography was superior), the film's equally episodic narrative comes off as contrived, crude and kitsch. Why on earth didn't Argento use again the vivid colour palettes that made SUSPIRIA and INFERNO so fabulous to look at? He had the chance in Jace and Adam's jewel-bleeding concept, but axed it as too fairytale instead of embracing its rich atmospheric possibilities.
I don't intend to dwell on the faults of the film here. I'll let others on this site pass judgment on the Toyah reject witches, the lack of scope in the Rome in violent meltdown scenes, the usual dodgy special effects and the final CGI shot that turns everything into a depressing bad joke. But to those who have a problem with the way the third mother is despatched remarkably easily, it's important to point out such a rapid demise also happens in INFERNO. The chain of gore set pieces (phallic torture instruments, cannibalism, baby killing, satanic weird sex) delivers blunt thrills, yet nothing shocks more than the money shot of a demon suddenly appearing by Sarah's bedside. What I like best about the movie? The autobiographical details woven into the scattershot time-lined story (the real mother/daughter Daria/Asia relationship is poignantly used), the train murder of the Japanese witch and lesbian white witch Valeria Cavalli giving the best performance teaching Sarah how to conjure up her mother's ghost with an enchanted powder puff. Then there's Claudio Simonetti's glorious music. Just as his group Goblin boosted SUSPIRIA, solo his chanting choral anthems give the opening an amazing power of thrilling expectancy and lift the clunky Hammer-type Black Mass ending.
Claudio Argento said it best at the premiere performance. He told me, "For the general public it's a good solid movie, for Dario's fans I'm not so sure". Now it's all eyes on the Italian box-office. How well LA TERZA MADRE does financially will determine exactly what his next project will be.
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