QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

An unashamed genre piece, The Body is a giallo – an Italian crime and murder mystery named after the yellow book covers of their literary equivalents. While it absolutely fits into that very specific Italian genre, it’s actually the fourth remake of Spanish murder mystery The Body (Oriol Paulo, 2012) following remakes in India (twice, as Game, A.M.R. Ramesh, 2016 and The Body, Jeethu Joseph, 2019) and South Korea (The Vanished, Lee Chang-hee, 2018).

The current version juxtaposes stock elements from gialli and popular fiction with some highly original ideas, which may or may not have been used in the earlier versions as yet unseen by this writer. The stock elements include: the womaniser suspected of murdering his wife, the hard-bitten inspector investigating the case, the man who has married into wealth, and the university professor having an affair with a student. The highly original ideas: a man running out in front of a car, a corpse disappearing from a morgue, and a married woman who is also a practical joker.

It hits the ground running with a high-profile death of rich, middle-aged, businesswoman Rebecca Zuin, not going into whether she’s a self-made woman or simply a wealthy person from a rich dynasty. Her younger husband Bruno (Andrea Di Luigi) seems less upset than you might expect, which is explained pretty quickly via the revelation that he’s romantically and physically involved with younger still Diana (Anna Campala). The narrative throws in further unsettling elements thick and fast, with much of the contemporary proceedings (at least when the characters are not stuck inside buildings isolated from the weather conditions outside) taking place in torrential rain.

That rain includes an early scene inside a car journeying through an isolated area when something suddenly and bloodily hits the windscreen. It transpires that the car has hit a man who ran out into the middle of the road. He turns out to have been the night watchman at the local morgue where Rebecca’s body was being stored. Something caused him to flee the premises in a state of panic. But what?

As further facts come to light, the mystery deepens. Chief Inspector Cosser (Giuseppe Batiston), accompanied by his assistant Mancini, (Andrea Sartoretti) must get to the bottom of it all. Initially, he doesn’t really understand how Bruno seems so unaffected by Rebecca’s death, since he himself has never quite got over the tragic death of his own wife in a car accident some years ago. She once told him he had anger management issues, a fact borne out by the Chief’s violent assault of Bruno as he starts to believe him responsible for the murder, an assumption which may or may not ultimately prove correct.

Then, just as you’re settling into the movie with the shocks coming thick and fast, director Alfireri starts shifting the narrative around in time via some deft cinematic sleight of hand with flashbacks concerning further revelations. We see the wedding of older woman Rebecca (Claudia Gerini) and younger man Bruno, where to his horror she publicly refuses to marry him because of what he has done to her, only to announce seconds later that this is a practical joke, so the wedding can go ahead. We see the married Bruno attempting to placate Rebecca’s sister-in-law when he nips in the bud a blossoming affair with her following a one-night stand… The same sister-in-law who works on Inspector Cosser’s team investigating the crime, who clearly has potential motives and could well be somehow involved. (But, is she?!!)

As incident piles on incident, revelation upon revelation, flashback on flashback and red herring upon red herring, much of the present day, or more accurately present night, action takes place in the morgue itself where Bruno is being held by the Inspector for questioning. At one point, he sleeps on a pull-out corpse drawer. Even in that morgue location there are flashbacks, with the nightwatchman discovering a corpse, and a mystery gunman suddenly appearing and shooting at him, causing him to panic and run. This is staged at least three times, with a different character as the shooter, as the revelations pile up and change our understanding as to what’s gone on. In the end, all the loose strands are tied together, and the whole thing makes perfect sense, but you’ll be hard pushed to work it out beforehand. Alfred Hitchcock, who found out on Stage Fright (1950) that presenting a lie as a flashback doesn’t work, would, I think, be suitably impressed.

The piece is effectively a two-hander: the two characters the narrative is really interested in are the husband suspect and the cop investigating him. As the former, De Luigi feels mostly like a serviceable version of the dark-haired male Italian protagonist in every other Italian film you’ve ever seen, although the flashback when he first meets and falls for his future wife at a fundraiser for the university where he has an academic tenure shows him with glasses and makes him look a much more intriguing character. Batiston is far more compelling as the Inspector; he is so mesmerising throughout that whenever he is onscreen, you can’t take your eyes off him. Although the other characters are integral to the plot, none of the other cast members here (which includes all the women) are ever really given much space to do that much with their roles: they are there for the very necessary purposes of background story information. The male inspector and his male suspect are really the only game in town.

One of the pleasures of a film like this, at least one this well executed, is being given pieces of a puzzle where you don’t start off with the complete picture, of which your understanding changes as you are given further bits of the jigsaw and realise that pieces you thought fitted into one place in fact fit in to another. It’s a game audiences love to play, and you may find yourself returning to the film for a second or third viewing to work out the finer points you missed previous times round. It’s most definitely a big screen production to be watched in the first instance in a cinema, but by its very nature ultimately deserves a life beyond that on various home cinema platforms or media.

That’s in part due to the impressive production design by Giancarlo Curio and painterly cinematography by Andrea Reitano with its skilful turning of the morgue interiors into pools of light and darkness, or making sure you see everything you need to see but no more in such moments as the car accident at the start, or the various speculative restagings of the morgue shooting incident later on. Mention should also go to the editing (by director Alfieri himself) which successfully weaves the numerous disparate elements together. The production oozes visual style in that particular way that only (some) Italian cinema can.

It would be fascinating to see how it compares to both the original and the other remakes. However, as a standalone experience for audiences coming to the story fresh, it delvers everything you could want. Terrific, edge of the seat stuff.

The Body premiered in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It is shortly to be distributed by Sony in Italy. Sony have global clout, so it would be nice to see an (Italian subtitled) version of this playing around the world, since it may well be a far better film than they think it is. (If I’m wrong, and a subtitled version is already planned for global rollout, I doff my hat in respect to the person or persons responsible.)