Regarde là-bas, un bateau! A man and a woman promenade along the waterfront after dinner. ‘It travels to other countries, other worlds,’ she says. ‘I’m so jealous of people who travel.’ Reverse shot on the sea, a Western rock tune1 kicks in. We stay for an awkward stretch of time on the almost mystical view, a few glowing dots neatly aligned in the pitch black that we only know from the lady’s remark being a ship. It is an unexpected meditative moment that takes us to the very core of Timité Bassori’s oddly psychedelic tale. Whether it is the afterlife, a distant place, or the future experienced through an ominously real hallucination, La femme au couteau is pervaded by a vivid sense of elsewhere that is in any case unknown, inescapable, and therefore source of dreams or nightmares. The conflicting awareness that what is perceived as a promised land is also sweeping away a cultural identity, intersects with personal human struggles, one becoming a metaphor for the other. As revealed by Bassori himself, the angry woman with a knife is the symbol of a traditional Africa fighting to reclaim her children. But however messy the structure he gave to the ambitious ideas of which the film is brimful, what her image evokes goes far beyond the intentions stated.
1. As the end credits make no mention of the soundtracks, I couldn’t help scooby-doo-ing around it, finding out that this particularly fine guitar solo is from an instrumental Southern soul interpretation of The Beatles’ Come Together by Booker T. & the M.G.’s (McLemore Avenue, 1970).
Discerning a parallel between the feral creature masterly incarnated by Michel Piccoli and the figure of the film director is almost inescapable. He goes round the house like a sleuth, equally attracted by a seductive woman and a rusty old contraption. He experiences the surroundings with juvenile interest, showing the same cynical detachment while skilfully cooking, recording normal sounds, reviving memories on the wall, licking honey on a pearly skin, or building a functioning pistol to then make it an improbable work of art—like a tormented storyteller in search of subjects, and his own self, as tedium triggers creativity in the most unexpected ways. Dillinger è morto is at once a daring existentialist satire and a witty reflection on the nature of cinema. So, is Dillinger really dead?
In Marco Ferreri’s inspired vision, identity crumbles as things are progressively dispossessed, becoming an addictive object of curiosity for the senses. Seamlessly assuming the form of an apartment, or a playroom, the world is designed by a bored man that clashes with the impossibility of designing himself as a human being, and so as such fails. Gestures and interactions lose their meaning fed by an aimless intellectual need for exploration that fails too, eventually reverting to the trivial. Touching, watching, tasting, hearing—like a child, he acknowledges his being an alien to the world he created around himself, and fleets from the nonsense to the unknown, to experience the illusion of a new excitement while nothing will stop the setting of a sun also made of plastic.
