Farmer was first a patient, and then a counsellor at a hospital in Vancouver where LSD therapy experiments were being undertaken.
Her job: to sit in a room with patients as they were tripping, playing records and taking notes.
Certainly fitting employment for a woman who would go on to play Oscar-worthy mental-hospital material.
Soon after quitting the hospital (when a patient became hostile and coworkers didn’t come to her aid as they’d assured), she starred in the Roger Corman vehicle The Wild Racers (1968) and then the film that would provide the mould for the upcoming Italian thrillers – More.
Barbet Shroeder’s directorial debut sees Farmer as a magnetic and enigmatic junkie who captivates a German traveller named Stefan; he follows her across the continent to Greece, where she gets him hooked on the heroin she gets from her sugar-daddy.
This role, along with her part in Georges Lautner’s Road to Salina soon after (1970) must have been the deciding factors behind her casting as Nina Tobias in Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and the typecast was set.
Four Flies is worth talking about here if only because it’s part of a larger trend in Farmer’s career.
To summarize – and the discussion requires that I give the murderer away – Roberto Tobias (Argento look-alike Michael Brandon) plays an emotionally vacant drummer in a jaw-droppingly terrible) Italian prog rock band.
Upon discovering that he’s being followed by sinister fellow in a trenchcoat, Roberto confronts the man and accidentally stabs him, only to be photographed in the act by a witness wearing an androgynous plastic face mask.
Reluctant to report the incident to the police, lest he be jailed for murder, Roberto goes home and tries to ignore what happened.
We first see his wife Nina (Mimsy Farmer) facing away from him in bed, asleep, as he struggles with the day’s events and fades in and out of a bad dream involving a public execution.
When she goes out the next morning, her goodbye to him goes unanswered, which establishes the lack of affection and distance in their relationship.
Still, when Roberto is attacked at night in his home by the same masked perpetrator who had photographed him earlier, he has no alternative but to confide in Nina, who urges him to go into hiding somewhere with her.
He refuses, and instead turns to his friend God (Italo staple Bud Spencer), God’s bible-quoting hobo pal, a charming gay private detective, and Nina’s nubile young cousin Dalia (French Canadian actress Francine Racette), who apparently has no qualms about playing house with Roberto once Nina takes off to be safe among other relatives.
As the investigation gets closer to a revelation and witnesses threaten to come forward, the bodies start to pile up.
Roberto, still convinced that going to the police isn’t an option, becomes a prisoner in his own home, waiting in the dark with a gun pointed at the door.
The murderer is revealed by means of a fictional scientific process: at the turn of the last century it was commonly believed that the retina retained the image of the last image a person saw as they died.
Thus, an examination could reveal key clues in cases of foul play – including the murderer’s identity.
In the case of Four Flies, such an examination reveals an image of four flies – which Roberto discovers at the film’s denouement to be the pendant hanging around his wife’s neck.
Roberto is understandably confused: “Why?” he pleads, as she trains a gun on him and smiles maniacally.
We’ve been given snippets of this story throughout the film as the investigation proceeded, but Nina lays it all out in a confessional monologue: “I wanted so badly to see you die slowly… painfully. Because you’re so much like him.”
She shoots him in the arm – a simultaneous close-up of her mouth, the piercing sound of her laughter and the bullet flying towards Roberto recalling Thana in Ms.45: after a silence that has lasted too long, the gun acts as her voice.
As Roberto winces with the pain, Nina continues: “It hurts. I know what it’s like. I’ve suffered too. My pig father – he made me suffer! Do you know he brought me up as a boy? He treated me like a boy – he beat me. He beat me! He said I was crazy. My mother – she died in an asylum. He brought me there too. Then my father died – before I could kill him! When I met you, I couldn’t believe it. It was like a miracle. You look just like him. I knew I would kill you.”
An earlier interview with a doctor at an insane asylum now makes sense: Nina had been admitted as a paranoid homicidal maniac, stemming from her father’s resentment of her (“I wanted a boy! Not a weakling like you!”), but when the father died, all symptoms disappeared and the doctors found her to be completely cured.
Then the interview ends with a loaded statement that is never addressed again in the film: “We suspected that the man was not the patient’s real father.”
Interpreting the meaning of this statement can only be speculative, but it does add to the film’s staggering layers of substitution and imitation.
Maitland McDonagh pointed out in her book about Argento’s films, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds, that the desire to marry the twin of her father acts as some kind of incestual wish-fulfilment on Nina’s part, but I think that – like many of the characters in this book – the issue is more one of approval, acceptance and encouragement.
Sadly Roberto is not a nurturing character, and any chance he had of reversing Nina’s trauma with affection is undermined by his own obliviousness.
Nina Tobias is a murderer, and she’s clearly intensely disturbed, but Roberto Tobias is a despicable jerk.
He ignores her, he cheats on her, and nothing in the film suggests that he has any conscience whatsoever.
As a female viewer of the film, I too wanted to see him die slowly and painfully.
Throughout the film Nina expertly feigns concern for him, calling all their mutual friends to check up on him, to convince him to turn himself in, or to go somewhere safe.
He shrugs off her suggestions and builds a wall between himself and everyone around him.
We don’t know yet that she’s a killer, so all we see is a talentless philanderer who has no consideration whatsoever for his beautiful, caring wife.
The interesting thing about how Four Flies operates is that even when Nina is revealed to be the killer, my sympathies are still with her.
I don’t know if this was Argento’s intent.
When Roberto first finds out that it’s Nina who’s behind the blackmail, emotional torture and multiple murders, he suddenly stops being afraid.
After all, she’s just a girl – she’s powerless to him.
He slaps her twice across the face, knocking her to the ground, as though punishing her for some domestic transgression.
He fails to realize that not only is she dangerous, but also that he has contributed to her paranoid mania by being so dismissive of her.
Like her father, Roberto associates femininity with weakness, and sadly, Argento is equally dismissive: he doesn’t allow Nina either redemption or revenge.
But he does allow her the film’s most beautiful death.
Armando Crispino’s 1975 feature Autopsy (the Italian title of which translates literally as ‘Sun Spots‘) starts off with a montage of infrared images of the burning sun intercut with a rash of suicides, all set to a pounding score.
Mimsy Farmer plays a forensic pathologist finishing her master’s degree.
Her thesis: defining the difference between authentic suicides and simulated ones.
The subject matter is admittedly getting to her – she immediately starts experiencing hallucinatory episodes at work, imagining that the dead are popping up from their beds and fornicating with each other.
This is the first of many indicators that, in poor Mimsy’s mind, there is something inseparable about sex and death, some crossed wires in her past that have traumatized her.
Both are presented in vulgar fashion, but Mimsy is admittedly more unnerved by sex than by even the most haunting, graphic blow-ups of gore and viscera.
Like my mother, who also worked hands-on in an intimate, sometimes gory medical environment, she exhibits a tangible revulsion toward sexual intimacy.
A beautiful young girl shows up at her door one night, claiming to be crashing at the apartment upstairs (which happens to be the abode of Mimsy’s dashing oft-absent father) and in need of an envelope.
She notices a display of disturbing photos laid out on Mimsy’s coffee table and picks one up with trepidation.
“You get your kicks from this stuff?” she asks, to which Mimsy replies – in a sinister tone that almost sounds sarcastic – “My interest is purely professional.”
It’s only ten minutes into the movie and we can already surmise otherwise.
It is obvious before Mimsy’s father even shows up on the scene that he’s the source of her sexual neurosis.
Despite the fact that he seems well adjusted and probably did nothing to facilitate it, Mimsy is suffering from a crippling Electra complex (effectively the female equivalent of the Oedipal complex).
At lunch, when he informs her that he’s getting married, she becomes hostile and interrogatory.
“You have the instincts of a wife – or worse – a mother in law!” he says, “It’s a good thing you have no time for men.”
In an unsuccessful attempt to bait him, she offers: “That may no longer be the case.”
Her boyfriend, spritely photographer Ray Lovelock, plays the clown – he’s a practical joker, yet she is utterly humourless.
Nevertheless, he’s extremely patient with her; every time they are about to have sex, she starts envisioning grinning corpses popping out of their body bags, which prematurely interrupts their activities.
Mimsy is devastated.
“I want to change”, she pleads, “Can you help me? Or don’t you think the art of seduction would have any effect on me?”
They try different speeds, different approaches, but nothing works.
He shows her pornographic Parisian slides (which are blown-up onscreen and are interchangeable with the death photos elsewhere in the film) and she tries to emulate the women in them, but gives up mid-blowjob: “Oh, this is absurd.”
When the envelope girl shows up dead in Mimsy’s lab the next day – another alleged suicide – Mimsy’s thesis is put to the test; she does not believe the girl committed suicide, based primarily on the fact that the fatal wound was in her face.
Good-looking girls tend to like to leave good-looking corpses.
The girl’s brother, a young priest (played by Barry Primus) agrees.
He knows his sister was murdered because of some information she held.
Discovering the exact nature of this information becomes the film’s primary mandate from here on.
The priest has a past of his own – he was once a temperamental professional racing driver who ran off the track and fatally wounded 15 spectators.
He retired, turned to the cloister, and now tries desperately to control his violent mood swings.
Mimsy is drawn to him, but can’t yet figure out why.
When her father is paralyzed from the waist down in an accident, Mimsy is devastated – but not for the reasons she thinks she is.
Her father signifies everything virile and sexual to her, and his emasculation mirrors her frigidity.
Mimsy comes to realize that she’s in love with the priest; she can visualize having sex with him without the ghosts of her profession intruding.
But it’s safe sex, because it will never happen.
He confesses that her feelings are reciprocated, but that he will never break his vows.
They both have scarred psyches, and both are frozen in a perversely determined inactivity.
Mimsy has only shifted her impossible love from one man (her father) to another; she’s not ‘cured’ by any means.
Mimsy’s sexual neurosis has nothing to do with the film except to make her a pawn and a temporary suspect; once the physical mystery is solved, the emotional mysteries of the film are abandoned.
This is a typical giallo move (a tactic also exploited in Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in Woman’s Skin), and one of the reasons giallo films stand out as so different from American mysteries: it is just assumed in giallo films that everyone is neurotic.
Still, it made for an interesting tagline: “She is the girl who knows more about death than about love. And he is the man who will teach her about both.”
The father-daughter relationship that forms the basis of her neurosis in this film duplicated itself throughout this part of her career – Four Flies, Autopsy and The Perfume of the Lady in Black all have a similar (sub)plot.
Like many female genre characters – Thana in Ms.45 and Catherine Deneuve’s character Carol in Polanski’s Repulsion (the 1965 film considered to be the mother of all ‘neurotic women’ horror movies) – Mimsy’s most unhinged roles have a paternal figure at the heart of their psychoses.
hexafu 