While everyone’s been wondering who should direct the next James Bond film, there’s a more interesting question that has yet to be posed: who should direct the next title credit sequence?
On the basis of Reflection in a Dead Diamond, French-Belgian filmmaking duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani would be an ideal choice. After all, the whole film is shot with that sense of wild symbolism, strange angles, cool motifs, and implications of story injected by shards of style. The average Bond movie keeps that up for the length of the title song. For Reflection, they pour that sensibility over every frame. The only reason it doesn’t become overbearing is that it’s so damn intoxicating.
Bond isn’t the only reference point, although Ian Fleming’s greatest creation would undoubtedly wink across the roulette wheel at John Dimas (Italian Giallo and poliziotteschi legend Fabio Testi). To misquote Dazed and Confused, while he gets older his Dimas girls stay the same age, and he has got so very, very old. Crumbled and rumpled, he’s a faded killer with a bad hip, drinking martinis on the beaches of the Cote d’Azur, impotently lusting after his neighbor at the hotel and dreaming of his life as an international man of mystery. In those glory days, the younger John (as played by Yannick Renier) was lantern-jawed, granite-fisted, and irresistible to all women save his partner in espionage and inevitable true love (Céline Camara) – Miss Moneypenny with a literally killer dress.
In those youthful days, Dimas was an amoral force of nature wrapped in a tuxedo, sent on a mission to win over millionaire (this is the pre-billionaire past, you know) Markus Strand (Koen De Bouw). The details seem hazy, but then that’s to be expected, since old John’s memories are fading, becoming an indistinct whirlwind of fast cars, roulette, disposable thugs, exotic locales, beautiful women, and deadly menaces – none more menacing than Serpentik, a murderous agent of unknown and unseen forces.
The parts don’t fit together. They meld like pools of blood, thick and rich. Even by comparison to their international breakout hit, fever dream crime flick Let the Corpses Tan, Cattet and Forzani seem disinterested in anything approximating to linear, coherent storytelling. But that’s not the point here. This is a visual tsunami, each image almost impossibly sumptuous and deliberately unreal. The more old Dimas recalls fragments of his exploits, the more the audience must ponder exactly what kind of unreliable narrator he is.
To furnish their world in suitably luxurious adornments without just becoming a high end Austin Powers, Cattet and Forzani’s aren’t just lampooning Bond. Their world is infused with the worlds of superspies and supervillains, Danger: Diabolik and Italian fumetti neri, photobook comics and The Lady From Shanghai. For all the pulp print influences, above all their works is truly cinematic, gorgeous, slick and deeply fetishistic. Young Dimas is classic suited eye candy, while Serpentik’s disguise may be the most erotic use of leather since Marianne Faithful sealed herself into that black biker ensemble in The Girl on a Motorcycle.
There’s something unabashed carnal about the films of Cattet and Forzani, and Reflection in a Dead Diamond finds them feeling out the connections between the physical and the psychological better than they ever have before. Their earlier works were often super-stylish riffs on genre tropes, too slickly sick to ignore but deliberately superficial. Reflection feels deeper, even tragic by the end. Conventions of classic spy filmmaking, like back projection behind a moving car for a chase scene, are used as more than just homage, but to dissect the real identities of Dimas and Serpentik. Cattet and Forzani don’t need to do something so prosaic as a Bond film: they’re too busy redefining stylish deception.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Texas Premiere
Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2:20pm
Fantastic Fest 2025 runs Sept. 18-25, Passes and info at fantasticfest.com.
Find all our news, reviews, and interviews at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.
