Luciano Onetti’s Francesca, as a neo-giallo, sought transnational appeal by looking to European horror. Drawing on the works of Italian directors Dario Argento and Sergio Martino in particular, the multi-talented Onetti (who co-wrote, directed, photographed, edited and scored) treads a line between pastiche and homage, deconstruction and distillation, with enormous skill.
Remarkably, Francesca is more than simply an homage to the tropes of the giallo; and unlike other (in the words of critic Anton Bitel) “artfully transcendent distillations” such as Amer and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, it is a mystery thriller as concerned with the narrative conventions of giallo as it is with giallo’s distinctive stylistic characteristics and iconography (even if its deconstruction of gender politics is not as pronounced). Onetti has stated that what attracted him and his brother Nicolás (who produced and co-wrote) to the genre was that its approach to style and narrative marked a departure: “The giallo narrative was so different, and even usually it had script errors.
We think that the idea of the directors at that time was to shoot it with style, using gloves, traumas, zooms, the unfocused, great music, etc.” Francesca features the masked, leather-gloved psycho killers, set-piece murder scenes and garish mise en scène of the classic ’70s giallo, but distills this iconography into a series of almost stand-alone symbols, emphasized by the insistent use of closeups. (Many sequences are made entirely of closeups.) Onetti’s widescreen cinematography evokes the visual style of giallo, including zooms for dramatic impact, and the color grading has the look of a remastered ’70s film. His progressive rock-inspired music score, heightened Foley sound effects and Italian dubbing deliberately mimic the sound of Italian ’70s cinema. And “trauma” features prevalently, not only in the film’s sensory effects, but also in its psychological themes of Freudian gender confusion and childhood-induced psychosis; Argento’s Profondo Rosso (Deep Red, 1975) and Tenebrae (1982) being obvious influences.
Francesca opens with a scene that might easily be mistaken for Argento. We see the wheels of an old-fashioned pram and a woman’s legs. A shot of an antique rocking horse and the woman’s plain black shoes, images which readily evoke childhood trauma. On the soundtrack plays a lullaby (as in Deep Red). Onetti cuts to a young girl with a doll. In the garden, she skewers the carcass of a dead bird. This is intercut with the mother, Nina (Silvina Grippaldi), rocking her baby in the pram. What is immediately apparent in the sequence, and continues throughout Francesca, is how, by utilizing just a few objects such as these antiques (and through sound), Onetti can evoke the giallo by the most minimal means.
We see the girl enter the baby’s room; we see her feet in child’s shoes; the handle of the pram; and a mid-shot of the girl (whom we already assume to be the Francesca of the title), raising the skewer. A shock sound effect of a slicing blade is followed by a brief, almost subliminal shot of the skewer in a doll’s face; the sound of the baby crying is mixed with Francesca’s childish laughter, as she leans over the pram watching the baby’s agony with sadistic glee. The camera then whip-pans from a closer shot of the skewer to the shocked face of Nina as she enters the room. Freeze-frame on her scream. The image bleeds to red and zooms in to a tight closeup of the distraught mother.
This sequence is the “psychodramatic primal scene” that Bitel identifies as a key trope of the giallo, and which informs the story to follow. Fifteen years later, a killer strikes the city, seemingly inspired by The Divine Comedy. The implication is that Francesca, whom we are told disappeared mysteriously shortly after the opening incident, has returned to redeem the world of sinners and damned souls. Her modus operandi includes leaving rare and valuable coins on the bodies of those she kills, in a reference to Dante. Francesca, we discover, was the daughter of a celebrated playwright and poet, Vittorio Visconti (Raul Gederlini), who himself becomes a suspect in the police investigation into the murders. Visconti is wheelchair-bound following an armed robbery of his house that left him crippled, and which resulted in Francesca’s abduction.
Naturally, nothing is what it seems and Onetti constantly plays with our expectations, especially in respect to the killer’s identity. As befitting the giallo, a gender switch takes place as part of the film’s final reveal. The lead investigator, Moretti (Luis Emilio Rodriquez), arrives at Visconti’s home with the intention of arresting him. It is revealed in flashback that after Francesca mutilated her baby brother, Visconti strangled her and buried her in the garden. Moretti discovers that Francesca’s mother Nina, who had been suffering from nervous breakdown ever since the incident 15 years ago, has committed suicide.
As the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place, Onetti reprises the imagery of the opening. Moretti discovers the child’s doll and rocking horse in a locked room, along with a tailor’s mannequin dressed in the hat and coat of the killer. An empty wheelchair glides into the room behind Moretti, and he turns to see Visconti—able to walk after all—dressed in a woman’s clothes. A fight ensues and Visconti is accidentally shot. As Moretti surveys the dying poet, a final twist sees the detective skewered from behind by a teenage boy with a facial disfigurement: Francesca’s mutilated younger brother.
As Onetti has noted of classic giallo narrative, “Usually it had script errors,” and so it is here, as these final reveals create new mysteries and ambiguities. However, the lack of resolution in Francesca is fully in keeping with the sense of postmodern abstraction characteristic of the neo-giallo. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Francesca’s middle sequence, which, like the works of Cattet and Forzani, recasts the giallo on the levels of abstract experimental film, psychodrama or dream-film. The traumatized mother dreams of Francesca in a park playground. Onetti bleaches out the image and then applies a kaleidoscope effect. Soon after, we are presented with naked female mannequins bathed in magenta and cyan light.
The killer’s gloved hand caresses the broken head of one mannequin, emerging from the hole like a spider; the mannequin’s breasts are similarly caressed. Onetti then cuts to the breasts of a real woman, fondled beneath her bra. We see the killer inspect photographic slides of flowers and vintage pornography. We see again the rocking horse from the opening scene; the baby holds a coin. The sequence serves little narrative function, nor does it present purely giallo symbolism. Instead, like Cattet and Forzani, and Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Onetti explores the intersection between the classic giallo and the European art cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, invoking the influences on the ’70s gialli of Antonioni, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other modernists of that era.
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