Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1070939
14 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 13 JANUARY 2019 FILM FILM WHILE he was certainly well on his way to becoming a criti- cal darling of European cinema ahead of the monumental suc- cess that was last year's trium- phant and sumptuous LGBT love story Call Me By Your Name, Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino is certainly up there with the trendiest right about now, and might just end up being a household name to match some Hollywood greats in the years to come. That is, if he can manage to weather the upshot of his latest, a long-gestating and ultimately misjudged re-imagining of Dar- io Argento's 1977 horror cult classic Suspiria; an ambitious mess of a film that's fascinating to observe for all the wrong rea- sons. The year is 1977, and as his country is in the grip of what would subsequently be called the 'German Autumn', a psy- chotherapist is visited by a danc- er client of his, Patricia (Chole Grace Moretz) who appears to harbour paranoid delusions that the dance school she attends is actually a coven of witches. The Jewish therapist, Josef Klem- perer (Tilda Swinton, posing as 'Lutz Ebersdorf' under heavy prosthetics), has demons of his own - he was forcibly separated from his wife during the war - and feels compelled to look into Patricia's claims, absurd as they may seem at the face of it. Meanwhile, a fresh American recruit, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) is welcomed into the same school - the Tanz Dance Academy of West Berlin - en- thused to break out of her re- strictive Mennonite community in Ohio following the death of her mother, and pursue her dreams of becoming a world- class dancer. But soon, Susie begins to suspect that Patricia's suspicions may not be entirely unfounded… something that appears intensified by the en- couraging treatment meted out to her by one of the school's head teachers, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), leaving fellow dancer Sara (Mia Goth) to pick up the thread that Klemperer extends… On paper, Suspiria sounds like nothing short of a tour de force. A modern take on a cult classic with such a high-pow- ered artistic artillery behind it that it should not, in theory, go wrong. But what Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajgan- ich have cooked up - reuniting after their previous collabora- tion with a bulk of this film's cast, A Bigger Splash (2015) - ends up feeling more top-heavy than dynamic, more pretentious than inspired. Encumbered by two intersecting storylines that never come together in a satis- fying fashion, the film feels like a rich layer cake that's tough to get through, and may just cause indigestion. To be sure, its cosmetic get-up is certainly delectable: the dance sequences - seriously lacking in the origi- nal - are possessed with genuine hypnotic potency and are ani- mated by a professional rigour by choreographer Damien Jalet. The cinematography is noth- ing short of exquisite, with Say- ombhu Mukdeeprom perfectly capturing the mood of 1970s Berlin and stepping up to the challenge when everything gets crazier and cleaves closer to the Technicolour madness of the original. But a lot of this melts into nought as the structure is not robust enough to support the film's ambitions. Grafting on subtext about a nation's war- time guilt onto Argento's evoca- tive but thematically slim origi- nal story is a great idea, but the script would have needed an- other bout of smoothening to streamline idea with represen- tation. As it stands, we are drip- fed plot points and spoon-fed the 'message', resulting in a hor- ror film shamefully devoid of tension, suspense and surprise. Luca Guadagnino's take on the Dario Argento cult classic aims high but falls hard, as its ambitions are undercut by messy execution DANCE TRANCE CHANCE PRANCE LANCED ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The verdict A film rich in both concept and talent, Guadagnino's remix of the Dario Argento cult classic collapses under its own weight fairly early on in its needlessly sizeable running time. Undeni- ably gorgeous to look at, thread- ed with a gorgeous soundtrack by Radiohead's Thom Yorke that is only marginally less im- pressive than the hypnotic cho- reography on display, its script is sadly a mess, and its layered 'innovations' over the original aim for poignancy and political punch but manage only a sor- did aftertaste of try-hard pre- tension. Red in tooth and claw all the way, but in the end just a bleeding shame. Suspiria will be screened at Spazju Kreattiv at St James Cavalier, Valletta on Janu- ary 17 at 19:30 A bleeding shame S U S P I R I A ( 18 ) Teodor Reljic Girl, you'll be a dancer soon: Dakota Johnson is Susie Bannion in Luca Guadagnino's top- heavy remake of Dario Argento's Suspiria Season of the witch: Tilda Swinton