Dark Glasses (2022)

 In his 80s, Dario Argento could be forgiven for not bothering any more, or for having absolutely nothing left to shock or surprise us with.  Glad to report, he still cares a bit, and he can still startle his audiences, though not with the trade mark gore you might expect.

His last few efforts - Giallo was described as "a deeply disappointing work from a director who seems to be yellowing with age, his vision progressively jaundicing" and Marc Kermode - perhaps forgetting he was talking about a Dario Argento film - decried it as a "depressingly sleazy shocker."  Marc, sleazy and shocky are what makes a good Argento film.

Sleazy, geddit?  Mark?

And before that there was The Third Mother, an incoherent (again, an expected trait in any Argento film) banal (very un-Argento quality) conclusion to the sequence started with the mind blowingly lunatic Grand Guignol brilliance of Suspiria.

So it comes as a pleasant surprise to encounter Dark Glasses, a likeable late piece in which all of Argento's considerable strengths and weaknesses are distilled into a short well made film.  It might be he's just put a whole bunch of his favourite cliches tropes - blood, over-the-top music, violence, nudity, berserk lighting, more blood -  into this minor piece, but it doesn't matter.  We get the always tantalising words REGIA DARIO ARGENTO at the start, and what follows does not suck.

Dark Glasses seems familiar.  It could be a film he made fifty years ago.  It has the fresh glee of an youthful director making his first feature, not an octogenarian making his twentieth.  It's the story of Diana, a sex worker (how very Argento), who finds herself targeted by a serial killer (again, very Argento) who likes stalking prostitutes and garroting them (possibly the most Argento thing ever).  Trying to escape him, Diana loses her sight in a car crash.  So far, nothing to write home about.  It's nicely done, if you like people choking to death on their own blood and pulverised bodies.

This is a Dario fuckin' Argento movie, okay?

Then it changes, just a bit.  Diana, struggles to cope with her blindness.  In a series of engaging vignettes we see her learning the new rules of her life and trying to make her way through in the world.  She befriends the only survivor in the other car, an eight year old boy called Chin.  They form an unlikely but convincing bond.

This is the bet part of the film - its charming, one of those words you wouldn't readily associate with Argento.  The success of the film depends on the performance of Ilenia Pastorelli as Diana, and she carries it off - both making Diana's blindness believable and making us care for her character.

A beautiful little opening sequence that hs nothing - NOTHING - to do with the main film

There's a sense here of an entirely different direction that Argento could have gone in, a nouvelle vague sensibility that reminds me of the early days of Godard and Truffaut.  Perhaps, in another world, Argento set aside the fake blood and grotesque kills to spend decades making poignant comedies.  I would have liked to have seen more of that Argento over the years, rather than the gorehound.

Then the film switches back into thriller mode as the serial killer decides enough of the making nice and decides to tidy up his unfinished business.  It's slickly done, with some nicely crafted shots and scene, though you get the feeling Argento is somewhat going through the motions, just showing those young pretenders to his bloody throne how its done.  The big reveal is pretty half hearted - a sort of Scooby-Do moment where the gang pull the villain's mask off and instead of going "Yikes!  Him!" they shrug and say, "Can't say I wasn't expecting that."  But you don't watch an Argento movie for the plot or narrative coherence.

There are a lot of Argento signatures here - a vibrant, over-done soundtrack.  It is not composed by Argento, but sounds like someone doing a good job of someone trying to do a Dario Argento score.  Lurid colour and light - perhaps his most distinctive calling card - is used, with scenes bathed in the strobing blue of police cars.  Framing and camera movements are delivered with the aplomb of someone who has been doing this for decades and knows what needs to be done without having to think too much about it.  It's as if Argento is saying, "I could still blow your minds" but doesn't really have the inclination to do that, just throwing in some violence as a sort of 'proof of life' to show it is really him behind the camera.

But it is the gentler middle section as we follow Diana, and then Diana and Chin, watching their lives unfold as they both try to make sense of their upended worlds, that is what you remember Dark Glasses for.

Star Rating: ***