nonhosonno film review

NONHOSONNO
(2000) 120 mins
MEDUSA FILM ; ITALY

I approached watching NONHOSONNO with the same mood you have when you have a relative entering surgery, and you stay, waiting and hoping for the best. I am aware the comparison is exaggerated, but I knew, as everybody, that this was the movie for Argento’s career. Although his two previous films, IL FANTASMA DELL’OPERA and LA SINDROME DI STENDHAL, had some success with audiences, they were not blockbusters.

Moreover, they have been slaughtered by the critics. There has always been a (sometime excessive) attack from the Italian critics towards Argento, but, honestly, in his last two movies there was little to be salvaged.

From the visual point of view, Argento has always been a great director, even in his worst works. What almost never works is the script, the construction of the story, the lines. PROFONDO ROSSO and SUSPIRIA are the few examples of good solutions to this problem, and it is not a case that they are known as masterpieces.

In the first Argento worked with Zapponi, who wrote with Fellini too. In the second the script is no more than a thin line: SUSPIRIA is a movie that has to be seen and heard, it is really the modern fairy tale, with no other aim than hitting, exciting and frightening the beholder. These objectives are wholly taken.
When the first news about NONHOSONNO came out, everybody in Italy appreciated the collaboration of Carlo Lucarelli (a good and famous Italian giallo writer), credited as screenwriter, as Ferrini (yet in Argento’s team and director himself) and Argento himself. Knowing that von Sydow was in the cast was reassuring too, as Argento has always had not so good actors. The soundtrack by Goblin, the location in Turin, a giallo: everything seemed to bring us back to the good old times.

Going back to the hyperbolic metaphor I used before: the surgeon is good, the ward is efficient, the anaesthetist is able too. We don’t have to worry too much, then. Lights off.

As usual, the first sequence is marvellous: twenty minutes of pure thrill ending with superb hand camerawork (not a steadycam!) along the corridors and passages of a train. The whole beginning can be taken as a model of the film: very good from the technical point of view (who, in Italy and abroad, moves the camera like Argento?), but poor in regard to the acting.

The prostitute, indeed, is just the first of a series of one-dimensional characters that will appear all through the film (background characters such as the parking attendant and the prostitute’s friend; but also main characters such as the girl played by Chiara Caselli and the killer himself, all lack substance).

The film goes on and the entrance of Max von Sydow works as a catalyst. Argento and his fellow writers create one of the best characters ever seen in a "genre film" (but are we sure that NONHOSONNO is it?): a round, human, realistic retired police chief, amusing without being grotesque. Unfortunately this is the one and only character so well defined. The complicated (maybe over complicated) plot keeps going on, and so do the murders.

Argento puts a lot of references throughout the film to his previous works: the animals, first of all (remembering the titles of his first films), of the rhyme leading the murders; the knives (shot from very close, as in PROFONDO ROSSO, and laid on red velvet, as in L’UCCELLO DALLE PIUME DI CRISTALLO).

Goblin’s music is a good background for murders carried out with not-so-common-objects (an English horn, a stylographic pen). The film is strong, although there are some low points, and, above all, is beautiful to see. In particular, I appreciated the work of Ronnie Taylor, the cinematographer of OPERA, showing a different Turin, not only as regards the way in which it has been shown in other Argento’s films, but also different from the way it is seen in Italian cinema. Moreover, this time the location is explicit, by signs written on the screen (was there the real need of that?).

After three quarters of the film, Argento pleases us with another great shot: a shot taken on the floor, with the camera running on a carpet, going through the feet of the people walking, ending on the feet of a ballet dancer moving fast in the air. After some seconds the cut head of the girl falls on to the floor. This scene made me think about the very attentive work Argento did on the times of the story. We are at the antipodes of the "videoclip shape" of PHENOMENA.

NON HO SONNO is not a slow film, but the suspense is very stretched, there are abrupt slow-downs functional to the whole rhythm of the film. The most evident slow down is in the ending; long, tense and very violent. Once more Argento makes us believe that the killer is Gabriele Lavia. Instead, he is just the last figure of a parent who tries to protect a deviated son (see PROFONDO ROSSO and PHENOMENA). This last element makes us read NON HO SONNO as a sum of the usual narrative and technical issues in Argento’s cinema, more proof that can make us consider him an author (with all the limitations and the critique that can be brought to this concept or category).

In my humble opinion NON HO SONNO is a good film, not only if compared to the last Argento’s works (it would be too easy). However, it is not possible to compare it to his first period, but Argento keeps on making movies as nobody else does in Italy. He dares, risks, experiments, amuses. Do you think this is not enough?
reviewed by Francesco Locane

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