Editorial

Bloody Cocktails at Troutbeck'S FilM Night

Originally printed in Compass, JUne 27, 2018.

There remains a certain electric magic in live cinema. Here in the Northwest Corner, Cindy Heslin and Jeff Palfini of Cornwall run Boondocks Film Society, bringing a blend of block party socializing and film appreciation to us. Over the summer the Society will host a different film once a month at a distinct venue, along with themed cocktails, food, and live music.

On June 29  at Troutbeck in Amenia the Society will screen Dario Argento’s 1977 “Suspiria” with blood-red cocktails. 

Dario Argento became known as a director in Italy when the giallo genre ruled the screen. If you’re familiar with Spaghetti Westerns, the Italian-produced cowboy flicks pioneered by director Sergio Leone, then giallo was the “Spaghetti Thriller.” Often set in Rome, the films featured an unusual collage of moods: romantic scores, chic clothing, beautiful women, cheap effects, masked killers, terrible acting and tons of blood. Ironically enough, today when many think of giallo, they think of “Suspiria.” But the film isn’t a true giallo, and it’s not representative of Argento’s work. It’s a true outlier, a film like no other.

To view “Suspiria” is a beguiling experience of dissonance: Is what you’re watching silly or scary?  Should you lean back and pull apart the pieces of its imperfect production, or lean in closer, absorbed by its spell? 

“Suzy Banyon decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous school of dance in Europe,” intones the banal voice of the narrator at the start of the film, like a gentle parent beginning a bedtime story. “One day, at 9 in the morning, she left Kennedy airport, New York, and arrived in Germany at 10:40 p.m. local time…” 

Twentysomething Suzy (Jessica Harper) walks among the crowd, gaze affixed in trepidation as she watches the terminal’s automated door open and close. The flimsy doors whoosh open and we hear — does Suzy hear? — the tinkling of piano keys like silver bells at Christmastime, hauntingly simple yet familiarly childlike. The doors close. Never has the mundane seemed so bewitching. Finding a taxi in the rain, she is rushed through the darkest night, through the deepest woods, as the score thrums to life, a prog-rock jam session with the choked cries of “…WITCH! ….WITCH! …WITCH!” Anxious moments are punctuated by the high whistle that could be a woman’s shriek or the howl of a boiling teakettle or the wail of a steam train, followed by a baritone bellow like a monstrous clock tolling midnight. 

The ballet school is a Gothic brick manor painted passion fruit pink, with interiors of deep sapphire, seating rooms wallpapered in bold floral patterns and peacock-motif decor, hallways that will come to be flooded in fire engine-red light. This is where Joan Bennet, famed for her matriarchal role on TV’s “Dark Shadows,” regally resides, throat ever-swathed in jewels, leaving her young pupils to the hands of the masculine Miss Tanner, a cross between Karl Lagerfeld and a nutcracker. Apart from a blind pianist, women wholly populate Suzy’s tumble down the rabbit hole. Even at death’s hand, her peers uphold a kind of desexualized dignity. There are no bare breasts or cheap sexual exploits in “Suspiria.” Red paint may splatter but this is a film of soft curled hair, nightgowns and ballet slippers. The women of this witchy world are brave, frightening, glamorous, suspicious, innocent, hero and villain — Snow White versus The Wicked Witch. It’s a girl’s horrific fairytale theater with no pas de deux for a prince.