Director: Dario Argento
Writers: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
Producers: Carlo Bixio, Joan Antoni González, Fabrizio Zappi
Cast: Elio Germano, Cristina Brondo, Elisabetta Rocchetti, Chiara Conti, Iván Morales, Elena Maria Bellini, Edoardo Stoppa, Horacio José Grigaitis, Guiseppe Lo Console, Giampiero Perone, Milvia Marigliano, Antonio Mazzara, Anna Varello, Lorenzo Federici, Carla Gambino, Alessandra Magrini, Emanuela Cuglia, Nicola Rondolino (uncredited), Lynn Swanson (uncredited)
Giulio (Elio Germano), a voyeuristic film student, spies on the sexy girl (Elisabetta Rocchetti) who lives across the street from his apartment. When the girl’s mother (Milvia Marigliano) is murdered, Giulio becomes obsessed with his suspicions that the girl is involved in the killing.
The Flashback Fanatic movie review
This was a project Argento made for Italian television to inaugurate a series of made-for-TV thrillers. The result is my favorite Argento film of the twenty-first century. Like most, I also see Argento’s '70s and '80s output as his best work. Since then, his plots and visuals may become more conventional (The Card Player -2004), or else he really goes off the deep end with excess and puzzling weirdness (The Phantom of the Opera-1998).
In Do You Like Hitchcock?, the fun, new territory Argento explores is life imitating film. As a director and former film critic, he also is dealing very directly with that classic Alfred Hitchcock theme of voyeurism. He is using that theme very consciously as a way to riff on Hitchcock film plot devices and the influence that movie culture has on characters in this story.
The unlikely hero in this tale of murder and voyeurism is Giulio, a college student of film studies. Giulio has a nice apartment in an ornate, old building in Torino, Italy. He seems to be able to spend all of his time watching classic movies on his DVD player and writing papers on them, then going to the neighborhood video store (remember those?) to rent more flicks to watch; now that’s my kind of curriculum. He gets to take a break from his studies to ogle the sexy brunette across the street from his apartment balcony who thinks nothing about leaving her bedroom shutters wide open while she admires her reflection wearing skimpy underwear and less; now that’s my kind of recess. To top it all off, Giulio gets to watch his DVDs with an incredibly cute girlfriend (Cristina Brondo) who’s always ready to push his play button; now that’s my kind of special feature.
Giulio should have it made, but his voyeurism and film interests fuel an obsession about what might be behind the nasty murder that happened to the mother of that brunette exhibitionist across the street from his pad. Then the fun for morbid film buffs really begins. Giulio starts applying plots from favorite Alfred Hitchcock movies to this situation without ever realizing that he is living out the James Stewart role in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).
This film is fun because the small cast of main characters is interesting, likable, and sometimes a bit petty. They are more accessible than many of the characters from Argento’s earlier, acclaimed films. There is also enough time and attention given to depicting the environment of Giulio’s neighborhood to make us feel a part of it.
Perhaps the film’s only letdown is the climax. It leads to a cliffhanger that seems to be putting the wrong person in jeopardy to rouse much audience suspense.
However, the last scene does come full circle in the story to end on a satisfying note of ambiguity: Does voyeurism keep leading to trouble and can the voyeur stop watching? Even given what has gone before, I have to admit I would not stop watching, either. That does not make me a pig; I admire anyone with an appreciation for giallo fiction, especially a beautiful woman falling out of her lingerie.
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