Reflection in a Dead Diamond
There are some jobs from which you can never gracefully retire, never fully escape, the past a place which continues to haunt, memories refracted in the present, John Diman a long-term resident of a prestigious hotel on the Côte d’Azur, spending his days on the beach, the water reflecting the blue of the sky, appreciating the fizz of his beer on his tongue and the foam of the surf on the skin of the woman he watches, the waves crashing in a pattern which is always the same yet fragments endlessly.
The sun shattered to a thousand stolen diamonds, that was another time, another place, but when the woman in the room next to his is found dead his mind makes the connection to the mysterious Serpentik, the case he was never able to close, a masked assassin with killer nails and boots to die for who he came close to many times but who always evaded him; is John D to be pulled back into the game for a final assignment?
Written and directed by The Strange Colour of Your Body‘s Tears’ Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, glittering facets of the Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort) fall like drops of blood in their stylish action Eurothriller mystery which is both homage to and pastiche of the sixties spy-fi genre, starring The Heroin Busters’ Fabio Testi as the elder version John D and Yannick Renier as the agent in his prime.
Misleading memories of triumphs and failures which have left hidden traumas, John D had failed to protect oil magnate Markus Strand (Koen De Bouw) and years later still retains the briefcase of gadgets, the world he left one of laser-rings which can see through the backs of playing cards and walls and sports cars fitted with machine guns, but how much is truth and how much his own desire to recreate a past which may never have been real?
With layers of art, artifice and illusion in both the film and the character of John D and his nemesis, the deadly leather-clad Serpentik wearing masks behind her masks and he himself replaced by a younger version in the same way as James Bond is reinvented for new audiences, there are aspects of Danger Diabolik, Modesty Blaise, Diva and even Psycho in the costumes, locations and details, and throughout images and events echo.
The film reinventing itself as does John D, casually reversing his jacket to conceal the blood of the man he has just murdered, each narrative jump illuminates a new facet, mesmerising but also misleading, Reflection in a Dead Diamond repeating compositions and ideas while altering the context and participants, the blue skies and the blue waves persisting but the sands shifting as uncertainly and randomly as the languages, a chaotic cocktail of madness.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond is available on Shudder now
