LENZI/BAKER: SO SWEET, SO PERVERSE reviewed

Though Umberto Lenzi's second Carroll Baker giallo, SO SWEET... SO PERVERSE, finds the director working once again with cameraman Guglielmo Mancori, editor Eugenio Alabiso, and composer Riz Ortolani, it has a totally different feel than its predecessor ORGASMO. Everything that was suggestive of a burgeoning auteurist touch in that picture is suddenly missing: the taut, insistent use of zoom-ins and zoom-outs, the extreme close-ups, the conscious emphasis on comic-strip-like compositions, the elastic studies in depth, even the clever use of diegetic music. You'll find none of that here. Instead, Lenzi couches this film in static images of impact, more telling art direction, extended takes, and a more languid, even downbeat soundtrack that seems suitable to the taken-for-granted wealth and comforts of the main characters and their search for meaning and new sensations from a place of middle-aged, existential despair. It's not for no reason that the film's theme song is called "Why?"

Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean Reynaud, a wealthy pharmaceutical baron, who has arrived at a sexual impasse with his wife Danielle (Erika Blanc) after only three years of marriage. He acts the past with just the right degree of amoral detachment, introduced driving a convertible through the streets of Paris with a shotgun available to view in the backseat. A tenant in an oversized building with an antique elevator and opulent, house-sized apartments, Jean overhears troubling activities going on in the apartment upstairs and finally rushes up to interfere with what sounds like a man beating a woman. He arrives to find the place seemingly empty, and he is drawn to exploring a converted church confessional in one of the front rooms, which opens to reveal an assortment of antiquated S&M props displayed against a red velvet drape. As he handles a small dagger, a bruised Nicole Perrier (Carroll Baker) re-enters the room. She's initially afraid of this new intruder but he slowly gains her confidence and they fall in love - yes, it's a bit too sudden to take such admissions seriously, but what's really going on between these two is more complicated than what they're willing to admit. Nevertheless, in declaring himself Nicole's knight in shining armor, Jean puts himself on the wrong side of Klaus (Horst Frank), a professional photographer who has long dominated Nicole in a relationship driven by fear and submission. Hey, it beats being rich and bored. 

The major differences between ORGASMO and SO SWEET... SO PERVERSE boil down to three other crew principals: the first is screenwriter par excellence Ernesto Gastaldi, who initiated the Carroll Baker gialli with 1968's THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH, directed by Romolo Guerrieri, which likewise shared the remaining two principals, producers Luciano Martino and Sergio Martino (Luciano's younger brother, who initially served as production manager). DEBORAH was likewise edited by Alabiso, but had a different cameraman (Marcello Masiocchi) and composer (Nora Orlandi). As one might expect given these returning key players, SO SWEET... is something of a return to Guerrieri's earlier style, which Sergio Martino himself would repeat and claim more or less as his own when he took over the family's gialli reins in 1970 with THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH aka BLADE OF THE RIPPER. This raises certain questions about how much control over the film's look and style Martino may have exerted, given that he was the persistent element. Lenzi's handling of both films is consistent and professional but the touches often credited to directorial guidance - the look and character of a film - are not.

In retrospect, there is a feeling about ORGASMO that its exciting visuals were employed to emphasize its Youth vs. Age theme and also to inject as much juice as possible into a thin and somewhat mechanical plot. SO SWEET..., on the other hand, has the confidence to let Gastaldi's pleasingly involuted script dazzle us with its own ingenuity; the sense it evokes of a smooth, anesthetizing ride underscores the privilege and restlessness of characters in search of excitement, however potentially dangerous. Lenzi himself was approaching the hallmark age of 40 when he made these pictures and he felt, in some ways, that his directorial career was only beginning to find its footing with ORGASMO. The protagonist of SO SWEET... has no wish to prolong his youth with young companionship - he's interested in women of his own age - but, at the same time, its entire constellation of characters seems hellbent on rejuvenating themselves with the spontaneity of incautious and irregular behavior. It should be noted that Spanish genre film favorite Helga Liné also appears in the supporting role of a colleague's wife, with whom Jean nearly has an affair.    

Neither Trintignant's hero nor Baker's masochistic heroine are all they seem, and - thanks to Gastaldi's pleasingly tricky script - saying that much doesn't even begin to qualify as a spoiler. The film's great revelation is Erika Blanc's performance, one of her best; Danielle starts out as the proverbial iceberg, emotionally numb and unresponsive to her husband, but in the last half hour her façade crumbles and we are shown the inner workings of an insecure, vulnerable, frightened woman laid bare. She just about steals the film, but this is also partly due to Baker's complementary performance, which dances with Blanc's in a pas de deux toward a quite different revelation. Nicole turns out to be the most masculine of the film's characters, with Trintignant registering as a confused but virile, essentially tender man. This film adds another facet to his extensive, underappreciated career as one of the icons of the European thriller, for such directors as Georges Franju, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Chabrol, Giulio Questi, and Bernardo Bertolucci. 

The greater auteurist imprint on this film belongs, I feel, to the Gastaldi/Martino/Martino triumvirate. It is very easy to step back from the present casting and mentally replace Blanc with Edwige Fenech, Baker with Susan Scott (Nieves Navarro), Horst Frank with Ivan Rassimov, and Trintignant with George Hilton - the repertory company who would soon step up to play and replay these figures in various different patterns in the Sergio Martino gialli of the early 1970s. This would suggest Lenzi as the most dispensable of all the main creative ingredients, but there's no shame in delivering a film to order, to serve as its trusted central facilitator rather than as another imposed personality. Of the two, I think ORGASMO is more visually exciting while the latter has the more palpable and daring story. The plot takes a daredevil leap around the 60m point that seriously risks alienating the viewer; the remaining half hour showcases the slow ratcheting of a mercilessly ironic postscript, before concluding with revelations quite other than those we are led to expect. For those viewers who can't resist thinking ahead and anticipating the turns still to come, this may result in a disappointing film, but when studied on its own terms, SO SWEET... SO PERVERSE is a handsome model of the post-DIABOLIQUE Euro thriller and harbinger of the more optically radical Sergio Martino gialli still to come.

The film has been beautifully restored with a 2K scan of its original camera negative and is available as part of Severin Film's region-free THE COMPLETE LENZI /BAKER GIALLO COLLECTION box set. The film is viewable in English and Italian versions with optional English subtitles; the English version is definitive as the lip movements show that all the actors were speaking English at least phonetically. The extras include excerpts from an airport interview with Lenzi, a brief 5m visit with Ernesto Gastaldi (who acknowledges the film's debt to Clouzot's LES DIABOLIQUES and doesn't seem to hold his own script in high regard), and a new audio commentary by DIABOLIQUE editor and critic Kat Ellinger, who delivers a well-organized, well-spoken and always interesting defense of the picture. It's possibly one of her best solo outings. 

   

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