The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)
A Film by Dario Argento
2xDVD9 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 16:9 | Cover | 01:59:23 | 7,47 Gb + 5,86 Gb
Audio: English DTS/AC3 6.1/5.1/2.0 @ 768/448/192 Kbps; Italian AC3 5.1/2.0 @ 448/192 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
A Film by Dario Argento
2xDVD9 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 16:9 | Cover | 01:59:23 | 7,47 Gb + 5,86 Gb
Audio: English DTS/AC3 6.1/5.1/2.0 @ 768/448/192 Kbps; Italian AC3 5.1/2.0 @ 448/192 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Director: Dario Argento
Anna Manni is a policewoman trying to capture a vicious serial rapist and killer. The problem is that she suffers from "Stendhal's syndrome", a psychosomatic disease that gives her dizziness and hallucinations when she is exposed to the sight of paintings and artistic masterpieces. When the maniac lures her into a trap inside Florence's famous Uffizi museum, her troubles are just beginning…
IMDB
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Anna Manni (Asia Argento) walks through a crowded art museum, where beautiful sculptures and paintings from Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Caravaggio fill the scenery. So beautiful, and so powerful in their message, they overwhelm Anna. She sees into them, their vision more lucid than even reality. She gets dizzy. It’s overpowering. She faints. That’s the Stendhal Syndrome, a case of a viewer of art so overwhelmed by the imagery that s/he is unable to retain consciousness. Anna has a lot more going on in her mind too, though. She’s a policewoman working for a rape squad, and she’s been tipped that Rome’s most notorious rapist and serial killer is inside the museum as well. Sure enough, he is, and shortly after she comes to, she’s viciously raped by the man she was stalking.
Alfredo (Thomas Kretschmann) looks like a good person, indeed he was confused for one when he returned Anna’s purse to her after she fainted. Lurking behind that slick blonde hair and confident smile is a misogynist bent on dominating women to contribute to his own narcissism. He often talks nice to his victims, courts them, and then rapes them, tying them up and then after he is finished, putting a bullet through each side of their cheeks. He demeans his victims, sucking the life out of them much like the paintings do to Anna. She’s a confident woman, but the rape scars her, leaving her wanting vengeance, and worse, to fill the dead spots he left inside her.
Anna cuts off all her hair, to which her brother remarks she looks like a boy, and sets out to trap Alfredo once and for all. In the pursuit though, she slowly starts to morph into what she is hunting. She sees a psychiatrist and tries to use painting as catharsis for the issues she is dealing with, but she ends up only painting the pain that Alfredo inflicts. She never wants to be dominated like that again, but killing him won’t be enough. If she can be him, no man will ever violate her like that again, right?
“Physical pain doesn’t bother me…it makes me feel alive.”
Anna says this in the film, but it may as well bare Dario’s name beside it. The Stendhal Syndrome is a fascinating catharsis for a man who has reveled in violence in his art for his entire career. Argento has never used violence for mere entertainment, he’s always played with it like a child a dead bird, flipping it over to see the death that we all subconsciously fear. He stylizes it, slows it down and examines every facet of pain, hoping that in his images he can find art, something that will lessen our collective fears of death. The fatal car crash slowed down and played five times over in Four Flies on Grey Velvet was a start, and Opera’s slow motion head wound (where the bullet ricochets later through a telephone in the room) shows Argento forever holding violence under a microscope to truly discover its power. Here he takes violence to its stylized limits, literally making it microscopic with CG shots of bullets going through the flesh or pills dropping down a throat. Physical pain doesn’t bother Argento, no, it is the psychology that drives him mad.
With The Stendhal Syndrome, Argento shows that art can exhibit great power both for its maker and its audience. These are themes he’s touched on before, like with Tenebre and Opera, questioning the role of the artist and his responsibilities when showing violence to the public. Here though, he internalizes it. This is about what art can do to the individual, not the society as a whole. He gets into the psychology of Anna, with her bouts with the shrink and even moreso with her artistic hallucinations. When in one dream she is raped by a portrait with a huge phallus, we as a viewer are reminded what true psychological horror is, and it is not the childish moral games of the Saw franchise. To her art is overwhelming, but her painting, both on the paper and at one point even her body, help her deal with the demons that haunt her mind. They don’t help her much, mind you, but still, it’s progress.
Argento shows great progress himself with The Stendhal Syndrome too, expanding his theories on violence in the movies to much grander statements about art and psychology as a whole. It’s not the pain of the flesh that’s the problem, it’s the demons it can instill in the mind thereafter. He offers a compassionate, sad and often brutal character portrait, severing most ties to the conventional giallo format he made and preached, this time truly devoted to character rather than plot. When the main killer stops being a plot device an hour in, Argento proves that he’s not just about making gialli, but instead about exploring the impact violence can have on its victims.
Anna’s harrowing change from being the victim to the victimizer is done with amazing skill, illustrated by Argento through various skillful pieces of mise en scene. Paintings are rife with thousands of motifs and symbols, and so too is The Stendhal Syndrome, his most academic film. Her name hints at her transformation, Anna Manni, and so too does her later courting of a Frenchman with the very feminine designation of Marie. The obvious signs are there too, she first cuts her hair to a boy’s length, and then later wears a blonde wig to match the hair color of her culprit’s.
Since this is a film about art though, how threatening, powerful and cathartic it can be, the metaphor that resonates most is a snow globe of Michelangelo’s David. The camera lingers longer than usual on it at seemingly random points in the movie, and slowly Anna begins to fixate her gaze on it as well. There it is, the ultimate figure of man in full exposure, both proud and nakedly vulnerable, and in it Anna can see herself what she wants to be and also the fragile specimen she currently is. The flakes that cover his body when the globe is shook, symbolize the chaos in her own life, but also speak broadly about art in general. That image returns Argento to his roots, with David becoming a literal abstraction, just like the elusive grainy photo in Antonioni’s Blowup that inspired Argento for his very first film. The abstraction of art shows to us the power of the mind, how we fill in gaps and make associations to better help us understand our existence. Anna wants clarity in life and in art, but everywhere is abstraction. That is the film’s greatest tragedy.
The Stendhal Syndrome is Argento’s most mature film, taking the surreal elements of Suspiria and the giallo genre tropes from films like Deep Red and fusing them into one mean character study and statement on the arts. The brutal story can be appreciated on its own, but the deeper you look into it, the better it gets.
Special Features:
DISC ONE:
- The Movie
- Theatrical trailer
DISC TWO:
- Director: Dario Argento (20:01) featurette
- Inspiration: Psychological Consultant Graziella Magherini (20:38) featurette
- Special Effects: Sergio Stivaletti (15:46) featurette
- Assistant Director: Luigi Cozzi (21:49) featurette
- Production Designer: Massimo Antonello Geleng (22:38) featurette
All Credits goes to Original uploader.
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