By Steve Erickson

It’s a bad sign that such an entertaining and visually stunning film, shot in CinemaScope, couldn’t play in theaters in this country.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond, directed by Heléne Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Streaming now on Shudder.

A scene from Reflection in a Dead Diamond. Photo: Shudder

French-Belgian filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have dedicated their artistic vision to an unusual service: creating hyper-stylized pastiches of ‘60s and ‘70s European genre movies. Before this, they drew inspiration from the giallo and the spaghetti Western. Their latest effort, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, turns to the Eurospy films made in the wake of the James Bond series.

Cattet and Forzani’s sensibility is lush, colorful, and sensual, but it can also be abrasive. They’re talented enough to imitate the films they love with sharp accuracy, warts and all. Reflection In A Dead Diamond is loaded with delightful period trappings. The camera zooms in and out wildly as it eyes a dancing woman. While being tortured, a spy experiences kaleidoscopic visions in his mind. The agent’s hotel is carpeted with rugs crawling with Op Art patterns. The final result of his homage adds up to something more than just parody or rote imitation. Reflection In A Dead Diamond pushes beyond the borders of its influences. As critic Andrew Dignan points out, “the Cattet/Forzani style tends to use these [films] for a form of stylistic extremity. The rhythms are skittery and staccato, with attention-grabbing edits to make the garish framings feel like riding a bumper car.” Following on the heels of mainstream cinema’s domination by sequels and reboots, Reflection in a Dead Diamond fashions a form of renewal as it digs through the past. It’s a hymn to the pathos of living as a popular fictional character.

John D. (played by Fabio Testi as an old man) is a 70-year-old who spends his days at a hotel on France’s Côte d’Azur, sitting and drinking by the beach. His hat and white suit resemble Dirk Bogarde’s costume in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, but Testi looks more like Sean Connery. A former spy, he still carries a gun when he goes out of his apartment. He’s living off a cache of diamonds that he recovered when he was a much younger man (Yannick Renier, in this incarnation.) This version of John D. lived a glamorous existence at the opera and casino, sleeping with beautiful women and chasing down the miscreants working for a a villainous oil company. But Reflection In A Dead Diamond‘s narration keeps slipping off the rails, as if someone has dropped LSD in John D. ’s martini. His past and present morph into one another — and neither seems quite real. The editing juxtaposes both incarnations of John D., with wild extremes of color and light heightening the disorientation.

1970s gialli were full of experimental elements for which they were rarely given credit at the time. Instead they were dismissed as examples of inept storytelling or of preferring style over substance. Maitland McDonagh’s book on Dario Argento, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds, links the director to the art films of his period as well as horror movies. Cattet and Forzani dig deep into these various cinematic influences. Their work is a sexually charged fantasy about the genre’s aesthetically conflicting undercurrents.

For example, their direction embraces the fetishistic, with fragmented close-ups and repeated symbols. Reflection In A Dead Diamond contains dozens of shots of eyes, an image repeated in a ring (that shoots a laser beam) that John D. wears. These eyes are terribly vulnerable, to both sharp weapons and, more insidiously, to being hypnotized by the sights they behold. Super-villain Serpentik (Thi-Mai Nguyen) wears a costume of skin-tight rubber that accentuates her body. The latex mirrors the prosthetic masks worn by some of the film’s other female characters. With her red acrylic nails and trusty knife, she acts out the standard role of a dominatrix, wielding phallic violence. Another woman’s mirrored dress doubles as a camera – in fact, a precursor to the smartphone. As in Connery’s Bond films, the younger John D. combines sexual sadism with an obvious delight in exposing his own body and a masochistic streak. In this film, sexual pleasure is always interwoven with violent impulses..

It’s impossible to say exactly when Reflection In A Dead Diamond is depicting ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ events, though the viewer can try to draw their own conclusions. Still, its last half hour lays out John D.’s experience clearly enough, so that it makes some realistic sense. Whatever the guy did in the past, he’s now a friendless man killing time in hopes of getting back to his old job. A poster that advertises “John D. Is Back” looks painfully generic.

There’s a fan theory that James Bond is a code name, not a person, which explains why different actors can play the role. Reflection In A Dead Diamond mixes machinations from spy movies with realities — those touching on filmmaking and the inevitability of aging. No matter how cool John D. thinks he was, he can never escape from the windup — the flickering word “Fin” (“end” in French). Cattet and Forzani look back at the past, not only out of nostalgia, but also because those cinematic archetypes are shaping the present. Instead of making elegies, they’re trying to expand today’s stylistic vocabulary, transforming storytelling into reverie. Thankfully, American audiences are able to stream Reflection In A Dead Diamond on Shudder. But it’s a bad sign that such an entertaining and visually stunning film, shot in CinemaScope, couldn’t play in theaters in this country.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here. He presents a biweekly freeform radio show, Radio Not Radio, featuring an eclectic selection of music from around the world.