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Bloodshot Heart
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At the 25-minute mark of Bloodshot Heart, something very odd happens. In the midst of a
tense, domestic scene between Hans (Richard James Allen) and his mother
Catherine (Dina Panozzo), the irritating buzz of a doorbell sounds insistently.
Hans then confronts, at the front door, what he assumes to be the bullish
ex-boyfriend of the home’s latest tenant, a delicate flower named Matilda
(Emily David). A fight ensues, culminating in Hans accidentally punching his
Mamma, and the intruder picking up a kitschy doorstop to whack Hans over the
head before fleeing.
But wait! A meaningful look has just passed between
Matilda and … a woman of her own age, wearing the same jacket as the
belligerent guy we’ve just been watching in the tussle with Hans. What’s going
on? Are there two visitors to the household? Did I miss spotting some crucial
detail, some in-between shot?
No, this switcheroo is only a preview of far more
wayward distortions of reality (and story) to come. Even the characters’ names
start swirling around, because Matilda will later use Hans to help forge a new
ID for herself as Sarah … and Sarah happens to be the name of a woman in Hans’
obscure past, often conjured in brightly coloured, grainy Super-8 beach shots
reminiscent of the opening of Chantal Akerman’s The Captive (2000).
A great deal radiates out from this crucial scene in Bloodshot Heart. It’s a Freudian
carnival of horrors: Hans hitting his mother is surely a secret act of wish
fulfilment, while his perceptual substitution of a man for a woman springs from
his own, somewhat twisted romantic and erotic fantasies. But also, as in the
films of Brian De Palma or Dario Argento, perception
becomes a recurring problem for us, the spectators, as well: we come to
regularly doubt what we see, hear, infer and recall along the 90 minutes of the
narrative.
And then there’s the counter-narrative, the one that
is not locked up inside Hans’ disturbed
head: what’s Matilda’s story, exactly? What is she after, who is she running
away from?
Bloodshot Heart is like the
modern-day version of an Italian Giallo horror-thriller from the 1960s or ‘70s.
It has all the right ingredients: erotic obsession, colliding personal
fantasies, vivid hallucination sequences, sick and twisted family
relationships. Key aspects of the filmmaking here exude a properly cosmopolitan
aura – something achieved too rarely in Australian cinema. Susan Lumsdon’s
superb cinematography, Matt Perrott’s sound design and Ola Turkiewicz’s
evocative score (was I wrong to keep hearing the first four notes of
Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” in it?) lift the mundane, everyday spaces
into a sinister, dreamlike realm. The editing by Shannon Michaelas soups up the
psychedelic shocks at the best, most delirious moments.
But the specific mix of Italian and Australian is an especially
important element in the vision of writer-director Parish Malfitano, an
Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) graduate. He has
undoubtedly woven traces from his own cultural background into this nightmarish
phantasmagoria. Seeing, for instance, the wonderful Dina Panozzo make a meal of
her role as Catherine will plunge some viewers back into memories of her vivid
contribution to Monica Pellizzari’s films, Just
Desserts (1993) and Fistful of Flies (1996).
In fact, all the central actors do a good job of
acting in a stylised (at moments literally dancelike) fashion, stopping short
of grotesque exaggeration. Richard James Allen’s varied background in the arts
includes a close involvement with gestural choreography, as we see, for
instance, in Karen Pearlman’s superb short I
Want to Make a Film About Women (2020).
Bloodshot Heart is a real
minestrone stew of cinephilic allusions and influences: David Lynch, Alejandro
Jodorowsky, Gaspar Noé, Nicolas Winding Refn, Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
all come to mind. Indeed, Malfitano refers to the project as “the drunken Australian step-cousin of
American and European cinema”, especially dating from the 1970s. This
already makes Bloodshot Heart a
national rarity!
But the local flavour, the Aussie inflection, stays
resolutely clear throughout. Partly this is a matter of fine detail: the production
and costume design by Dylan James Tonkin offers many delightful, indelible glimpses
of suburban wallpaper, daggy clothes and domestic trinkets.
When it comes to a necessary touch of humour,
Malfitano can no longer look to the Giallo canon of Argento, Mario Bava or
Umberto Lenzi for tutorial guidance. The genre, in its original form, is in
fact often grimly leeched of fun – creating its effects of hysteria (in all
senses) purely from deliberate stylistic overkill. (I will never forget a
packed Cinémathèque française crowd laughing like crazy at every scene of
Argento’s Tenebrae [1982] – while
completely loving and honouring the film in that very gesture.)
Bloodshot Heart takes a different
path. There’s a line of suburban satire (it was filmed in New South Wales)
summed up by the running jokes concerning Hans’ day job as a driving instructor
for the “Keep It Wheel” company, and the strange behaviour of Hans’ mates, a
gruesome pair of blonde-haired brothers (heartily played by Peter-William
Jamieson and Matt Lausch).
I have deliberately spelt out little of the plot in Bloodshot Heart, for the good reason
that is better for viewers to discover the surprise twists and unexpected
developments for themselves. It doesn’t give too much away to say that, to my
eyes and ears at least, the most central influence on Malfitano and his
collaborators is the British director Peter Strickland, himself a connoisseur
of Giallo, the maker of the tricksy Berberian
Sound Studio (2012) and the woeful The
Duke of Burgundy (2014).
As in Strickland’s films, the main aim is to whip up a
kind of vertigo for the viewer in which the baseline of the story’s reality can
never be taken for granted, where dream, memory and hallucination are utterly
confused – while, simultaneously, the material texture of everything from
curtain fabric to pasta sauce becomes voluptuously, hideously palpable. The
step from 1970s Giallo to contemporary queer cinema (not to mention Performance
Art) turns out to be short and sweet.
So, there comes a point where you will be either very
glad to have “lost the plot” of Bloodshot
Heart, or very frustrated. In an interesting and essentially positive
review, Bill Mousoulis comments: “The film didn't
leave me with much ultimately, in terms of any insights or deeper feelings, but
this should be seen as a restriction of genre cinema, and not of this film
itself”. He’s quite right to point out that genre films are very often more
about their own mechanics than meaningful themes. Giallo cinema takes that
tendency to an extreme, and the neo-Giallo of Strickland or Malfitano intensifies the operation still further.
This is why I am in two minds about the publicity
materials that take the tack of stressing a putative critique of “toxic
masculinity” inherent in this parade of warped psyches and violent acts. This
seems to me like a bit of special pleading, with one eye nervously on the Me
Too zeitgeist. But it’s pretty silly to seek a politically correct critique in
a movie of this type.
The truth is that the appeal of Giallo for its many fans
has always been its all-pervasive air of perverse disrespectability: sexuality
(of every kind and gender) has a generally toxic pallor in these decadent tales
of incestuous bonds and kinky ménages.
And if that’s a wavelength you’re happy to tune into, Bloodshot Heart offers a heady experience.
© Adrian Martin July 2020 |
