While Falesse stabs Michel the scene cuts back to the young Falesse stabbing a man in the primal scene.Ī second victim shows up, a friend of Michel’s named Alex, who turns out to be a slightly harder kill for Falesse. Then Michel is quickly dispatched by Falesse in her bedroom while he snoops through papers in her drawer. The first murder in the present is of an animal: Colin kills Michel’s German Shepherd after he sees it begin to dig where the corpse is buried.
#Burly men at sea title screen series
This is depicted in another flashback told in a different visual style: with a series of photo freeze frames (this time tinted blue, and in another such still photo flashback in black and white). Lucille explains André’s disappearance to Michel as a death by drowning at sea. Colin, an artist who treats murder as an art (a giallo theme), encourages Falesse’s ‘therapy’ and refers to her as a ‘praying mantis.’ The first victim is a man who claims to be a cousin, Michel Bordelin (Victor Alcazar). Falesse, who believes she murdered her father thirteen years ago, and was sexually abused, copes with the traumatic experience of patricide by replaying the decapitation with each new visitor. As is if to warn the viewer of what is to come, the film offers a second title card: “What has been remains imbedded in the brain nestled in the folds of the flesh distorted it conditions and subconsciously impels….” (Freud).įor the next twenty or so minutes the villa is visited by a series of males who promptly become Falesse’s next victim. His distraction allows the police to apprehend him, and he stares at the woman while being led away by handcuff, inexplicably keeping silent about her actions. The quarry, Pascal (Fernando Sancho), finds his way onto a villa grounds, where he gets distracted by the sight of a woman, Lucille, setting a yacht adrift at sea and then burying a corpse (we presume the one seen in the primal scene that was rolled in a red carpet). The opening is intercut with a (poor? See endnote 1) day for night police car chase of a man on a motorcycle. As the story develops the plot twists deepen, thicken and practically strangles the viewer into abandoning all reason and submitting to the film’s glorious ‘Freudian’ logic, expressed in the two title cards imaged above. The first ‘explicit’ reading of this scene is the murder of a husband/father by either the wife (Lucille, played by Eleonora Rossi Drago) or young, teenage daughter (Falesse, played for the majority of the film by Anna Maria Pierangeli).
This scene will become the ‘primal scene’ or ‘punctum’ 1 which is referenced throughout, with each subsequent flashback to the scene offering –a la Rashomon– a different interpretation of the events. The tableau is framed in a theatrical style, with the boy in the foreground and daughter in the background. For example, the flashbacks to the primal scene stand out with a psychedelic styled prism-like splitting of the image in two or three, while other exposition flashbacks are handled in a montage of photographic freeze frames (echoing La Jetée). Visual (and aural) style is always at a premium in the giallo and In the Folds of the Flesh, though not in the league of a Bava, Freda or Argento, has an arresting visual style marked by stylistic shifts. Where it fits in with giallo decorum, along with its easy on the eyes pop art design and color scheme, is the way the back-story continually thickens with a carousel of revolving (and evolving) characters, plot twists, and subjective flashbacks of the same primal murder scene.
In the Folds of the Flesh (1970, Italian-Spanish, Sergio Bergonzelli) is one of the weirder entries into the giallo genre, which, if you are a fan of this Eurocult genre par excellence, you know is saying a lot! In most respects it deviates from standard “who did it” giallo plot because the mystery is not so much who is the killer (although that is in question), but who is the victim, and why. In the Folds of the Flesh A Giallo Rarityīy Donato Totaro Volume 12, Issue 10 / October 2008 15 minutes (3663 words)