1996, Italy
Original title: La sindrome di Stendhal
Inspired by the 1989 book of the same name by psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who coined the term to describe the psychosomatic disorder involving the disorienting or hallucinatory effects of great works of art (named after the 19th century writer Stendhal, who first reported the symptoms), Dario Argento’s late-period giallo stars his daughter Asia Argento as Detective Anna Manni, who is in Florence on the trail of a serial rapist-murderer.
When she experiences the syndrome while visiting the Uffizi Gallery, it is Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus that makes her faint, and when revived, she has momentarily lost her memory – and it is the rapist himself who hands her back her purse.
As he ushers her into a taxi, she rolls the window up, revealing the image of his reflection fused with her own.
Later that night he attacks her in her room and though she passes out from the trauma, she awakens in a car where he is raping another woman.
He gets away (with her gun), and she is forced to endure the typical bureaucratic response to this kind of violation – the interrogation, the probing medical examinations – and exhibits the standard behaviour of the rape-revenge heroine: she cuts her long hair short, adopts gender-neutral clothing and returns to her childhood hobby of boxing, dismissing her boyfriend Marco’s sexual advances.
When she eventually responds to Marco by becoming aggressively sexual with him, putting him in a submissive position, it is the first sign of a transference in which she identifies – like Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage – with her attacker.
After a second attack – in which she kills the rapist and throws his body into the river – Anna becomes obsessed with him, convincing herself that he’s still alive and is going to come for her.
He’s “left his mark on me”, she says, referring to a scar on her cheek, which she now covers with a long blonde wig – the film’s third phase of her physical transformation. “I feel myself changing”, she confesses to the psychiatrist her superiors have ordered her to see.
Like the paintings in the film, Anna becomes a mutable canvas that changes styles and effects on her intended audience (as if to emphasize this, part way through the film she takes up painting, covering herself with the oily substance and writhing on a canvas on the floor – effectively making herself a part of her own painting).
And like Thana in Ms.45 she adopts a noirish vamp persona, and is framed as such by highly stylized lighting that accentuates her elusive and threatening nature.
By adopting this third persona, Anna is able to use the trappings of male desire to become a destructive force poised against patriarchy itself.
Her issues with male control pre-date her rape; her father is stern and unloving (he is even dismissive of the incident and doesn’t see why therapy is necessary, as though it’s a shame to the family), and her need to control the thing that incapacitated her results in her becoming romantically involved with an art history professor with a gender-neutral name (Marie) who is punished for his interest in her.
Her now-dead attacker becomes her other; ‘he’ kills Marie because he must have Anna for himself – which allows Anna to be desired, to have control, and to be free of responsibility all at the same time.
Because Argento traditionally fetishizes his scenes of violation, something must also be said for Asia Argento being lensed in this fashion by her own father.
Asia Argento has stated that she only took up acting to win her father’s attention, and that he only became her father when he was her director, which adds troublesome import to the fact that she is raped repeatedly onscreen with murderous hands grabbing at her that are – as in most of Argento’s films – his own hands.
hexafu 