Amanzio Berzaghi (Raf
Vallone) pleads with top cop Duca Lamberti (Frank Wolff) and Duca’s smartass subordinate Mascharanti (Gabriele Tinti) to find Amanzio’s
missing daughter Donatella (Gill
Bray/Gillian Bray). Even though
she’s twenty-five and well over the threshold of adulthood, she’s also mentally
challenged and has the maturity level of a three-year-old. Plus, Donatella’s a full-blown flirt who “loves
doing anything men ask of her,” forcing her father to keep his apartment locked
down like a fortress. Now it’s a race to
see who will find the culprits first and what will happen to them afterward.
Duccio Tessari’s Death Occurred
Last Night (aka La Morte Risale A
Ieri Sera) is a Eurocrime/Poliziotteschi film, but it hews slightly closer
to an American Police Procedural in its general approach to the narrative. The film isn’t action-packed like, say, The Big Racket or Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man.
It is very much a slow burn with a slow build, focusing on the banality
of the day-to-day tasks of investigating a crime in Milan. It is interesting, then, for how unexploitive
the majority of the film is in terms of violence, how very exploitive it is in
terms of sex. The hookers shown all do
their damnedest to put it all out there, and they drop their clothing like they
would a used tissue. There also seems to
be a very conscious decision on the part of Tessari in the casting and depiction of Donatella. Without being too indelicate or insensitive,
she is closer in the looks department to a model than to someone most people
would identify as mentally challenged.
She dresses in apparel designed to show off her womanly assets, and
there is even a lingering shot of her trying to figure out how to put on her
bra, which focuses almost exclusively on her breasts. Further, as Amanzio describes the life he had
with his daughter, the film gives off a very distinct whiff of incest. This, thankfully, is never explored, and
their relationship is nothing more than one of familial love, giving more power
to this father’s anguish.
That said, I think the
juxtaposition of the hookers with Donatella and their treatment by the
filmmakers is relevant to one of the film’s themes, and it is one of
objectification of women. These women are
essentially pieces of meat to be traded for money; their bodies their only
value. Were Donatella of sound mind, she
may have been able to escape her captors or think her way out of her
situation. Because she can’t, she can
only cry out for her father’s help. Errera,
the black hooker (essentially a double strike against her from her experience
with Milanese society) whom Duca takes into his flat, understands her situation
all too well, although she tries to play it as if she were in control of her life
(“There’s no pimp behind me; I’m free”).
Nevertheless, later the truth will come out (“I’m still on the streets
with a different pimp”), and it is this acknowledgement of her station that
causes Herrera to go down a self-destructive path. Additionally, it is another character’s
desire to be wanted physically which plays a large part in the film’s
resolution. Yet this desire clearly
rises from a place of loneliness and possibly from the consideration that it is
physicality which defines beauty and worth.
This mindset would almost certainly emanate from the behavior of men in
regards to hookers and the bodies of women like Donatella, who do not appear to
have anything else to offer a person outside of their anatomy.
Beyond this is a debate on
morality and the value of human life, and this is, intriguingly, played out not
in the police activity with local pimp Salvatore (Gigi Rizzi) or the dealings with Amanzio, but in the scenes of Duca
and his wife/girlfriend (Eva Renzi,
whom I’ll refer to as his “lady,” since I couldn’t find a name given to the
character either in the film’s subtitles or on IMDB) at home. Duca is of the opinion that people are
predominantly scum, and they are exploited by other people, who are equally
scum-esque. This first comes up when he
visits his lady at her newspaper job and comments on the violent photos they
use. When she states that people are
violent and they are merely reporting such, Duca retorts that he wants it to
end, that in some way, by keeping these types of things in the public eye, they
continue to be propagated. Despite this
cynical, world-weary view of life, Duca tries desperately to cling to a sliver
of hope. He plays guitar and sings while
at home. He is a giving romantic with
his lady. This also explains why he
takes Errera into his home. Ostensibly,
it’s so she won’t be harmed by anyone or harm herself before he can find
Donatella. Yet, as the film plays out,
his and his lady’s conversations with her tend to revolve around her inability
to recognize her value as a human being.
In spite of this, neither one can stop the hooker’s self-harming
tendencies. This presents us with the
central question of the film, and to my mind, it’s not the obvious one of who
has the correct perspective on life; Duca or Errera. Rather, I like to think that it takes for
granted a pessimistic attitude toward mankind and instead asks “why should we
care?” Clearly, we can only answer such
questions for ourselves, but I think that Tessari’s
confidence in his audience’s ability to parse out this conundrum is what
ultimately makes this film as strong as it is.
Another way this film differs
from other Eurocrime films, at least to my reckoning, is in the stylistic
techniques Tessari employs. The sequences where Amanzio recounts
Donatella’s kidnapping and their life before that are strung together in
fractured time. The editing leaps back
and forth, with very little to anchor the viewer as to when the events take
place. When we flashback to sequences of
the Berzaghis’ happiness, it is accompanied by an oddly rowdy lounge-tinged
song, further reinforcing the idea that even when times were good, they were
still filled with disarray and a sense of anxiety. In all of this, the full exposition of the
story is given while simultaneously cultivating a stark sense of chaos,
mirroring Amanzio’s mental state and desperation. As Duca and Mascharanti search the city, many
of the scenes which we would expect to be loaded with banter or with Procedural
dialogue are edited with music rather than any diegetic sound. What they say in the course of their routines
is inconsequential. In fact, the
audience could likely recite it all for them with little effort, because their
dialogue in these scenes is not the point of the film. The kidnapping investigation is merely the
context for the content of a deeper conversation Tessari wants his audience to contemplate. It shades the film as something of an odd
duck at first glance, but once the veneer of genre is stripped away, what
remains is a philosophical quandary which may have a simple end but hardly by
simple means.
MVT: Wolff does a very nice
job of playing a man at odds with his existence. He cares, but he can’t really show it in
public. He is frustrated by the world he
encounters, but he believes it can be changed.
All encapsulated by an actor with a truly shrewd and withering glare.
Make Or Break: Without
divulging anything, the ending of this film is outstanding. It satisfies while also putting a period on
the end of sentence which is still a question.
The more I think on this film, the more affected I become by it and its
final frame.
Score: 7.25
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