Married directorial pair Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have consistently risked being hit by the type of criticism that considers “postmodernism” a dirty word. Many a contemporary arthouse filmmaker likes to riff on the tropes and stylistic sensibility of the disreputable but distinctive film genres, and they are hardly the first filmmakers to pay homage to Giallo horror, sexploitation, and chintzy spy movies. What sets them apart is not having much interest in simply striking the poses and allowing the viewer’s knowledge of the references to poke gently at nostalgic spots. The real B-movies of this kind always had a little bit of weirdness to their edits and compositions, or an excess to their framings and colorings, and the Cattet/Forzani style tends to use these 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. With Reflection in a Dead Diamond, they’ve delved deeper into their bag of tricks than they ever have before and come up with both their finest film to date, and something like the ultimate postscript to James Bond and the spy movie as a whole.
Summarizing what happens in Reflection will be beyond the abilities of most reviewers, and possibly the creative team’s: even the most skeptical would have to concede that its use of montage is closer to experimental film techniques than most narrative films. It starts off as something about a 70-year-old spy in a white suit (Fabio Testi) at a luxury hotel by the Côte d’Azur who’s obsessed with a woman also staying at the hotel. But once we start flashing back to his younger self (Yannick Renier) and his involvement with the mysterious leather-suited Serpentik, the film becomes profoundly disinterested in making itself clear and turns into a whirlwind of gaudy transitions and untraceable shifts in power dynamics. It’s like a Spy vs. Spy cartoon with real people, particularly the ones where the female Grey Spy triumphs over the two men.
Some of the creative choices in Reflection are easier to approximate, such as the two most memorable outfits being Serpentik’s highly feminine and highly deadly fetish-adjacent gear, and a metallic dress whose mirrors serve as cameras: catnip to any filmmakers enamored with cutting loose formally with reflections and playbacks. There’s also comic book panels, plenty of meta-cinema, enough latex masks for eight more Mission Impossible films, and ridiculous props like a bullet-shaped lipstick. Descriptions of certain formal choices and stagings would likely defy description, but the recurring use of hotel carpeting patterns to mark transitions recalls Scott Stark’s great Hotel Cartograph, and certain sequences suggest what could have happened if avant-garde filmmakers like Paul Sharits were fully embraced by popular cinema. The titular diamonds get used for everything from mise en scène glitter, to sharp-edged weaponry, to op art-influenced graphics in a way that allows the film to pay tribute to the James Bond opening credits sequences in its own nutty fashion. One fight scene even turns the need to obscure particular elements of violent scenes into a sort of Brechtian joke about how blatantly obvious these types of cuts and framings can be in most movies.
“What does it all mean?” largely comes down to how seriously you take it. The two most notable film influences cited by the directors are Mario Bava’s colorful ’60s campfest Danger: Diabolik and Monte Hellman’s late period digital ramble Road to Nowhere, which also stars Testi. The latter film being heavily focused on deconstructing Vertigo might serve as the key for how Cattet and Forzani combined these two influences: the spy who usually saves the day in a self-consciously ridiculous fashion is now chasing a woman who he doesn’t even recognize anymore, she’s largely stringing him along, and the means of cinema will shape his downfall. It’s a playful reconfiguration of the so-called magic of the movies: you still wind up absorbing the spirit via osmosis of the old tricks, but it’s as upside-down and mirrored as the titular visual.
Published as part of Tribeca Film Festival ’25 — Dispatch 3.
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