alternate stendhal syndrome review 1

THE STENDHAL SYNDROME
aka
LA SINDROME DI STENDHAL
STENDHAL'S SYNDROME
(1996) 114 mins
MEDUSA FILM ; ITALY

I , and probably the majority of Argento fans, found Trauma a mediocre film, especially by this director's standards, and the (very) bad reviews that followed Stendhal Syndrome almost had me convinced that the "Maestro" had "lost it". What a relief it was when I viewed the film at the Athens International Film Festival! It is not that it is his best film since Tenebre.

Not ONLY that.

Let's take it from the beginning. Stendhal's Syndrome is a "mind disease". It's symptoms are dizziness and hallucinations when the sufferer is exposed to paintings and artistic masterpieces. A woman (Asia Argento) enters a museum. She suddenly enters the paintings' worlds in great Argento tradition. She emerges and returns to a hotel room where we discover that she has total amnesia.

Next scene:
A hotel room. Asia's getting up, faces a small painting on the wall and dives into it. Through the painting she discovers her past (what a great directorial idea). She is a policewoman whose mission is to hunt down her rapist. Too bad he found her first. A minute afterwards she is brutally raped in one of the most shocking scenes in Argento's filmography.

It is the next take that caught me by surprise. Asia, facing a mirror, while she realizes in real horror what has happened to her, takes a pair of scissor and cuts of her hair. Never in his career, has Dario Argento showed such sentimentalism for his leading character. Let me put it differently: We couldn't care less about Jessica Harper's fate in Suspiria, right?

Instead, this time we really care about Asia, we hurt, we scream silently each time we come to know her better and better. Take notice that it is not the gore scenes that shock us most in Stendhal Syndrome but the scenes where she injures her self with pins and paperclips (this sent shivers down the spines of the audience of the packed 600 seated theatre in Athens). There's only a drop of blood in these scenes but the effect they have is enormous! Argento has reached the major point of his maturity as a director there.Many have said that the whole family sequence could be thrown away. How foolish! These scenes are extremely important to create a psychological profile of this tragic character, the most tragic Argento ever created.

Finally, at the end (where the script takes a big - yet believable - twist), the viewer cannot hide his sympathy for her, although I will not reveal the film's ending. I caught some spectators (most of them female) with tears in their eyes and who could blame them! Finishing, I would like to add that it seems that everybody gets a great kick by dancing on Argento's so-called "artistic grave", and what a shame it is. This is horror for the mind and so much, much deeper than all your Fulci's put together.

I give "The Stendhal Syndrome" 4.5 out of 5 and that only because somewhere in the "center" the pace gets a bit slow. But then again, nobody said that "Stendhal" is an easy film...

Argento may not be the future of horror cinema anymore. But he is it's stunning present.
reviewed by Akis Kapranos

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