Le orme

This is why I love Italian gialli. Despite the somewhat true but nevertheless very tiresome claims that the Italian filmmakers are just rip-off artists, this one loose genre that only really had its heyday for a few years in the early 70's displays more originality and creativity than mainstream Hollywood films have in the last 20 years. (And some American fanboy directors like Quentin Tarantino have largely made their career by ripping THEM off).This film is not only unlike any other gialli; it's unlike any other movie I've seen. A woman (Florinda Bolkan) is haunted in her dreams by a long ago television show she saw of astronauts being left stranded on the moon. To relax she goes to an eerily deserted seaside resort town where she thinks she's never been , but where everyone seems to remember her visiting the week before. She gets more and more paranoid and confused. Meanwhile strange men in astronaut suits keep appearing. . .

Unlike the typically hysterical-from-the-get-go gialli, this movie gradually creates a sense of paranoia and unease. It mixes dream, reality, memory, and the media (television) to the point where the viewer is left as disoriented as the troubled protagonist. The end is bound to be a little disappointing after the build-up, but it's pretty memorable too.

While most gialli have an overabundance of characters, this movie is largely carried by Bolkan. Fortunately, she is more than up to the task. Bolkan was a Brazilian actress who, like Austrian beauty Marissa Mell, had a career that was often overshadowed by her personal life (and she probably didn't help this with her lesbian affairs and public claims of having been JFK's last lover). Unlike Mell though she was much more than just a pretty face and her talent can readily be seen in movies like this, Fulci's "A Lizard in Women's Skin", and the nunsploitation classic "Flavia, the Heretic". Klaus Kinski and the Ida Galli also put in brief cameos in the movie, and unfortunately so does young Nicoletta Elmi (who was kind of the Dakota Fanning of 70's Italian films--not a terrible actress but one that appeared in so many films you start to look forward to seeing her on the back of a milk carton).

Director Luigi Bazzoni's first giallo "The Fifth Cord" just came out on DVD. Hopefully, this one won't be far behind. Snap it up if you like gialli or if just enjoy unique, well-made movies. Highly Recommended.

Alice (Florinda Bolkan), a translator living in Italy, discovers that she has a memory loss and can't recall the last couple of days. She starts to follow a trace of memory fragments, which leads her to the small town of Garma. People in the town seem to recognize her and she's beginning to suspect that the re-occurring nightmares of astronauts conducting horrible experiments has something to do with her own amnesia.

The movie is interesting and the plot is good, but it's a bit to slow moving and arty for my taste. The plot takes some nice twists and it's really hard to figure out where it's heading. Florinda Bolkan is good in her role (but even better in "Flavia the Heretic") and it's always nice to see "star" child actor Nocoletta Elmi. Klaus Kinski's role is too small though. This is not a movie for the die-hard gore hound or exploitation addict, but still a very nice hour-and-a-half mystery.

This is actually a very good surreal mystery movie, despite the description that tries to sell it as a Sci-Fi movie. Balkan stars as a woman haunted by mysterious visions and lost memories that she is trying to piece together. She spends the majority of the movie trying to make sense of her visions. Very atmospheric and effective. It is true that Kinski does not appear very much in this film, but the staring actors are very good. There is only an English dubbed version available in the US, and the dubbing leaves something to be desired, but the actors do a very good job. The cinematography, by Academy Award winner Vittorio Storaro is excellent. An earlier Giallo by director Bazzoni, THE FIFTH CORD, is also excellent, and also lensed by Storarro.

Footprints on the Moon is an example of what could be described as a bloodless giallo. These were entries from the Italian sub-genre that were more directly psychological in approach. After the success of Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970, these more subtle gialli became scarcer on the ground and a host of serial killer flicks were the norm. Footprints harks back to the older style but adds a dash of 70's paranoid thriller into the mix. The result is a somewhat surreal film which has a decidedly enigmatic tone and effect. It was directed by Luigi Bazzoni and shot by Vittorio Storaro, who also was cinematographer on Crystal Plumage as well as the later Hollywood film Apocalypse Now (1979). This duo also worked together on the earlier classic style giallo The Fifth Cord (1971). Both their movies display restraint in terms of salacious material, while both look beautiful due to Storaro's consummate skill. The lunar material looks wonderfully off-kilter, the widescreen compositions are consistently great and the use of black and white to recall strange memories and dreams works extremely well.

It starts fantastically well with a startling opening segment set on the moon, where we see astronauts drag an unconscious compatriot and then abandon him. It turns out a female translator is dreaming about this, when she wakes she discovers she has no memory of the last three days. She recalls a film she saw many years earlier called 'Footprints on the Moon', a film that recalls her dream, where a scientific experiment is carried out where astronauts are left stranded on the moon to test them. She discovers a torn postcard addressed to her of a place she is sure she knows but does not know why, she travels to this off-season tourist area and meets several people who know her but whom she does not know herself.

This one is typified by a sustained atmosphere of dread and it really delves into the fragile psychology of the protagonist, who is very well played by Florinda Bolkan, who was one of the most talented of the performers to regularly appear in gialli. This role is a fairly complex one and benefits a lot from Bolkan's subtle skills. There is also an appearance from another giallo regular, Nicoletta Elmi, the little red headed girl who played oddball children in several films from the time. In this film, she is given a bit more to do and is a little more integral to the plot. Evelyn Stewart and Klaus Kinski appear briefly, the former as Bolkan's friend in Italy and the latter as the mad scientist Blackmann from the film-within-a-film. The location where most of the action occurs is the resort of Garma which is an otherworldly dream-like place, with a vaguely Arabic feel and ruins; it feels like a dying place. The film feels like a combination of dreams, reality and movies. The science fiction film-within-a-film is a strong idea and the image of the abandoned astronaut is a peculiar and compelling one. This sci-fi thread blends into the fabric of the main story and that by the unforgettable final moments it has encroached entirely into Bolkan's reality. It's a memorably surreal way to end one of the most distinctive films in the giallo sub-genre.

Interesting and entertaining 'mind game', dream-like, moody mystery, as a woman can't account for several lost days of her life, or why so many people at a resort she's never visited seem to know her.

She's also haunted by very odd black and white dreams where an astronaut is betrayed and left to die alone on the moon.

The film is slow in parts, and some of the big twists are easy to see coming, but it is beautifully photographed by Vittorio Storraro, and eschews the gratuitous violence and awkward sex of most of the Italian thrillers of the era.

This doesn't feel like its trapped by any formula or rules. And the acting is pretty good for a dubbed film.

Not in the class of films like 'Don't Look Now" or "Vertigo", but gets points for trying to be and doing so in a classy way. I'll be interested to see this again.