Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have fashioned a fascinating art-house career by pulling the stuffing out of various genres. Amer reworked coming-of-age themes into a trippy, erotic charge. The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears found novel, voyeuristic uses for the whodunnit. Let the Corpses Tan battered heist and hideout tropes into giallo formations.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond similarly offers a gleeful shaken-not-stirred fragmentation of the Bond film, a vertiginous, high-gloss fantasia replete with casino wheels, assassins, improbable weapons and yachts.
Inevitably, the Belgian duo have crafted the most convincing Bond film since A View to a Kill, albeit one blasted to smithereens and giddily reassembled.
The premise, at least initially, gestures toward something fixed. In a faded Riviera hotel, the ageing louche John Diman (Fabio Testi) becomes fixated on a young woman whose diamond body jewellery glints in the sun, an image that appears to unlock a Proustian rush of memories.
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These recollections cast him as a debonair superspy (played in youth by Yannick Renier) entangled with glamorous lovers and elaborate conspiracies.
The film quickly destabilises even this opening gambit: is Diman remembering a life lived or roles once performed? Cattet and Forzani decline to clarify, instead plunging viewers into a splintered consciousness where identity, time, bodies and movies gleam and refract endlessly. What follows is a fever dream of masked killers, kinky costumes, weaponised fashion accessories and high-concept set pieces.
Bernard Beets’s editing rhythms are associative rather than logical, folding together past, present, fiction and whatever passes for fact in this universe. Pulp Fiction’s Maria de Medeiros makes a welcome return to the big screen. References to the giallo masters Dario Argento, Sergio Martino and Mario Bava underpin this delirious homage to mid-century European genre cinema, with special love notes to the pop-psychedelic excesses of the 1960s Eurospy boom.
Image and sound keep shamelessly bouncing into the red. The experience is exhilarating, even if the jostling crowd of signifiers leaves little room for emotional anchoring. That hardly matters. Reflection in a Dead Diamond cares not a jot for the confines of conventional narrative and identification. This is cinema as bombardment, as fetish, as swooning fan collage. Who needs a new Bond film?
At Triskel, Cork, from Monday, May 4th, and available to stream on Shudder
