LIBIDO (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

The Italian-made LIBIDO is called a "giallo" now, but in its day I imagine it was seen as just another psycho-thriller with a particularly strong debt to 1955's DIABOLIQUE. 

The film was co-written and co-directed by the team of Ernesto Gastaldi and Vittorio Salerno. Neither man directed more than a handful of films, and most of their credits are for their writing, with Gastaldi racking up the greatest number of familiar genre-movies, including WEREWOLF IN A GIRL'S DORMITORY and AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK. 

LIBIDO starts with a flashback to the childhood of its protagonist Christian. As a young boy Christian is jolted out of his childhood innocence when he responds to a noise in his father's private room. There the child sees the dead body of his father's mistress, whom the father has just killed, presumably during accidental "rough trade." 

The script fast-forwards to the present, when Christian is a young but troubled young man (Giancarlo Giannini). He returns to his family home for the first time in years, ostensibly to take stock of all his inherited possessions, along with his fiancee Helene, his lawyer Paul and Paul's girlfriend Brigitte (Mara Maryl). It's established that on the same day Young Christian discovered the mistress's body, the murderer apparently committed suicide by leaping off a cliff, though the body was not recovered. Paul and Helene are all business about their purpose here, but Brigitte is a giddy young thing who enjoys tempting the disturbed Christian with her body. Christian's complexes are not helped by the fact that lawyer Paul has been like something of a father to him over the years, and that Brigitte is a blonde like the murdered mistress. (In the dubbed version I saw, no one even ventures a word about what Christian's mother was like.) In addition, Paul and Brigitte sleep together in the mirrored room where the murder was committed. 

Then Christian begins seeing little peculiarities, suggesting that Dead Old Dad may actually be alive and roaming around the house. To the writers' credit, they not only know that a lot of viewers will be smart enough to anticipate the old "lawyer-out-to-steal-the-inheritance" angle, so the script allows even the disturbed Christian to be smart enough to suspect Paul on that score. The other three manage to short-circuit that possibility by revealing a side of Christian's nature that he's blocked from his mind. And then the murders start happening-- and given the small four-person cast, there's not a lot of choices for the plotter(s). And of course, it wouldn't be a DIABOLIQUE imitator without a final twist, which some have compared to Roger Corman's 1961 PIT AND THE PENDULUM.

Derivative or not, LIBIDO looks great, crisply photographed and well acted, which makes it more enjoyable to watch than the cruder spawn of the giallo thriller.