Reflection In A Dead Diamond

Bluesky

Diamonds are not valued just because of their inflated price. People enjoy them because the are the sparkliest of gems, and they sparkle because they have multiple reflective surfaces. To see a reflection in a diamond is to see it multiple times, from different angles. Tiny flaws in natural stones give each of those reflections its own unique character, much as we might find when we reflect on times gone by. When an old man in a Panama hat, catching the sun on his hotel verandah, sees a slender young woman in a red bikini walking through the surf, memories come flooding into his mind. When she takes off her bikini top and he sees a diamond nipple ring sparkling in the sun, his mind flashes back to his adventures as a spy.

This is Mr. Dimon (Fabio Testi), who was once a top secret agent (unless what appear to be memories are a fading mind’s interpretation of films he has seen). These days he receives complaints about his staring, and he’s struggling to pay his bills. After all this time, one case continues to haunt him – that of the chameleon-like assassin Serpentik. Despite the many encounters and the many times that he got close enough to tear away the skin of one of her disguises, he never did uncover her true identity.

Cigarettes burn in intense close-up. A forest fire is projected onto a woman’s naked torso. “We’re entering a new era,” one agent remarks to another. Soon there will be free electricity for everyone, an age of abundance – and yet powerful corporate forces are wrestling for control. The sinister Markus Strand (Koen De Bouw) wears a ring with a pyramid-shaped stone which he uses to fight or to torture. He is followed by one of our hero’s colleagues (Céline Camara), who wear a silver spangled dress which conceals secret recording devices. It’s also surprisingly handy in a fight, but won’t preserve her from a sticky end.

Serpentik is nobody’s prey. Clad in a black leather catsuit, leaping through the air with the agility of a ballet dancer, she kills a man using a table football machine, then takes out several more. Razor-sharp, steel-reinforced fingernails are her preferred weapon, painted ruby red, and she wears a ring from which she can inject deadly poison into her enemies’ necks. But it’s her ability to change her appearance – including her race – which confounds. The younger Mr. Dimon, known simply as John (and played by Yannick Renier) goes up against her in instalments recounted in fumetti neri, the supremely stylish Italian comics of the time, inviting us once again to wonder if he’s fictional – or, perhaps, simply a recurring character found where reality and myth overlap, like Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. A brief glimpse of Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and David With The Head Of Goliath reminds us that these reflections go back a lot further than just one set of lifetimes.

Do the likes of John and Serpentik really grow old? One strand of the film suggests that they do, and that they are as unprepared for it as anyone else, for all that they retain some of their special skills. It is also implied that they might simply shift form – becoming characters in comics or films, that multiplicity a form of immortality. Many of the gorgeous images from which this film is comprised are likewise reimaginings of what has gone before. The Bond-like silhouette that dances across the screen, his bullets precipitating showers of diamonds when they hit their targets. A deadly laser going to work. Brightly coloured sports cars snaking around the sharp turns of Europe’s southern coast. A beautiful woman tied up in a room full of striking geometric shapes. A spinning roulette wheel. Mr. Diman by the sea like Aschenbach in Death In Venice, with slightly kinder make-up. Serpentik’s lair with its distinct echoes of Danger: Diabolik.

There are other foes, of course. Among them, John is told, a dangerous man who hypnotises his victims into thinking they’re in a film, until they hear the deadly word fin.

Reflection in A Dead Diamond has been described by some critics as ‘pure cinema’; they make that sound like a complaint. It’s true that it doesn’t set out an easy narrative, but why should it? There is plenty to dazzle the eye. For something so lovely, it is hard-edged, and it sparkles with visual wit. Every film loses its charms in the end, but it’s likely that filmmakers will be reflecting on this one for as long as the medium exists.

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