What I appreciate about Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Let The Corpses Tan, The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears) as filmmakers is that they are fetishists. Drawing upon memories of genre cinema – a gesture, a moment, a flourish – and not simply re-creating them, but deconstructing and exploding them. With Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025), there’s clear reference to European genre cinema from the 1960s and 1970s: the masked bodysuit thief from Danger: Diabolik, the surreal touches of James Bond title sequences (and their Euro knock-offs), the presence of Fabio Testi as the central character (star of Eurothrillers like The Big Racket and Contraband), and the soundtrack compilation use of Ennio Morricone, Stelvio Ciprani, Nora Orlandi, Bixio/Frizzi/Tempera, etc. Image is emphasised over dialogue and narrative is filtered through looks and concepts.
As an old man in a panama hat and a white suit, John Diman (Testi) sits at a seaside hotel, sipping a drink, the sight of a young woman in a red bikini and the revelation of a nipple piercing with a diamond spurs something inside. The sparkle in the sunlight from a diamond, a piece of glass, or the water on the horizon. Flashbacks to Diman as a younger man (Yannick Renier) operating as a secret agent during the 1960s. The past and the present intermingle, inevitably implying a collapse between how much was real or a fiction. Celluloid memories and comic-book tales, a subjective perspective on a fantasia of violence, sex and diamonds.
Even at 90 minutes, Reflection in a Dead Diamond feels dense with visuals, gimmicks and themes, particularly the re-staging of a James Bond spy as capable of brutal violence, and the ‘looking back’ a critique of the past’s promise of innovation, butting against rigid archetypes and calculated plots. I’m a sucker for this type of style IS the substance, and the cataloguing of tropes and iconography within an identifiably formalist and post-modern approach that defines Cattet and Forzani’s auteurist project.
I wish I saw this in a cinema but it’s streaming on Shudder in Australia.
VHS Tracking 