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‘Reflection in a Dead Diamond’ Review: While James Bond Awaits a Reboot, French Pair Pay Eye-Popping Homage to His ’60s-Era Imitators
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani worship at the altar of vintage gialli, honoring a Diabolik-inspired hero as he looks back on his career highlights.
In just the second shot of the film, Italian actor Fabio Testi’s eyes fill the ultra-wide aspect ratio — an introduction even more dramatic (but less impactful, without proper setup or suspense) than Charles Bronson’s first appearance, gazing up from his harmonica, in “Once Upon a Time in the West.” We’re in “pure cinema” territory here, where words are kept to a bare minimum while images tell the story, each composition playing off the last: Dimas orders a beer, cut to an extreme close-up of the amber liquid being poured, match that to sea foam splashing against the woman’s skin. Bringing the many threads together toward the end, the directors incorporate fumetti pages (both hand-drawn comics and the photo-based adventure books) and a movie-within-the-movie called “Mission Infinity” (starring Hervé Sogne as the generically handsome John D.) into the postmodern smorgasbord, as “Death in Venice” meets “No Time to Die.”
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