After the distant film by Mario Bava (1968), Diabolik returns to the big screen, a beloved character, created in 1962 by the Giussani Sisters, Angela and Luciana, for the Astorina publishing house, drawn on the features of Robert Taylor.
In this new transposition, where we find ourselves, if not in the imaginary Clerville (a mix between Bologna and Milan, while in the final the city of Ghent will be Trieste). And when, if not at the end of the 1960s, in a roaring Jaguar E-Type that whizzes brightly through the night, mocking the unleashed cops in pursuit?
Leading them are Diabolik’s main opponent, Inspector Ginko (Valerio Mastandrea), a pensive policeman who always fumbles with his pipe. But it was not long before the femme fatale, Eva Kant (Miriam Leone), entered the scene. The story told in this film, the first of three declared even if with a different male interpreter, introduces the mechanics between the three protagonists, in view of future adventures.
The plot revolves not only on the theft of a pink diamond, but also on Diabolik’s love for Eva, who must be freed from a compromising past, and on Ginko’s obsession with the criminal. Alongside Luca Marinelli in the role of the protagonist, we also find Alessandro Roia, who is the man of power corrupted and blinded by passion, Serena Rossi, Diabolik’s wife, unaware of the secrets of her beloved, and Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, who is Sergeant Palmer, Ginko’s right hand. Claudia Gerini also appears briefly.
The Manetti Bros, Marco and Antonio, frequent visitors to reinterpretations of the so-called genre cinema, as well as direct the film, sign the screenplay together with Michelangelo La Neve and Mario Gomboli, who for decades has been writing the stories of comics. With this their Diabolik they create a very respectful, philologically precise homage, with a faithful reconstruction of the original spirit of the comic, well-kept in terms of scenography and costumes. We are also referring to the narrative style of the time, which extends even to the acting acting of the actors, to the postures and intonation of the voice, to the lines of the dialogues, to the perfectly quoted music (work by Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi). which contribute to coating the film with a Hitchkockian coldness).
But the narrative times are also adapted, which are very slow, almost scanned, and unfortunately, also thanks to the often dark photography (indoors or at night), this together causes a deadly effect, while certain shots look like frames from a photo novel, a genre then very popular. To which the authors had looked, the two ineffable Giussani sisters, gentle bourgeois ladies who would never have said themselves capable of such audacity, while they wrote still stories on paper much more vivid than the frames of the film on the big screen. The stories, created starting from 1962, were published in pocket books, to meet the needs of commuters, and had reached very high circulation (800 books and 150 million copies sold), also translated into Esperanto, becoming a real phenomenon of costume.
They had even attracted censorial ire thanks also to Diabolik’s unscrupulous relationship with his lover / accomplice Eva Kant (drawn, it is said, on the features of Grace Kelly). Diabolik, the pure criminal, cynical and devoid of morals, for whom the end justified any means, was a precursor of the “black” genre (as opposed to the “thriller” thriller of the time), a character initially modeled on the famous French Fantômas , a negative hero who kills casually without any remorse and who will let himself be involved in the feeling only when he meets a kind of double ideal, Eva Kant.
Here the glacial hero is well entrusted to Luca Marinelli, who is necessarily impassive, while Eva, sunny and luminous (moments in which the photograph illuminates the scene) is Miriam Leone, who does exactly what the role requires, that is the woman / diva sure of himself and his own power. Valerio Mastandrea is Ginko, impassive too, as if the characters were visual representations of the correspondents in print and their personalities mattered very little. Which is a respectful narrative choice, as we said, but which generates an uninspiring result, which ends up making what is a well-kept costume film with little soul, like its protagonist, very unconvincing. Perhaps a compromise between these ambitions and the more pop / trash tone of the 1968 film would have been better.
This Diabolik seems to be aimed at an audience of fans (but how many will there be?), Nostalgic for a truly innocent era, in which the Catholic Church drew up lists of recommended or banned comics, and the Law had the good time to deal with a newspaper previously reserved for adults, fearing that it could undermine the moral integrity of the new generations. All topics that today are very far from the mind of the average viewer, unable to grasp the taste of the retro operation, in which this treatment could perhaps generate perplexity and disappointment, accustomed as he is to very different rhythms. So the Manetti brothers, abandoning their style full of hyperbole and irony, may have created a product that is too cultured for the market to which they are aimed. We will see how the box office responds.
#Diabolik #Review #comic #book #hero #big #screen