The Possessed

I was going to review “Green Room” this week. The disc was literally in my player, but something else caught my eye before I could boot it up. Usually, to combat any chance of procrastination, my apartment is kept meticulously clean and distraction free. But, despite my best efforts, I had left out Arrow Video’s Blu Ray release of ‘The Possessed” and I couldn’t resist its allure.

It was a little known Italian thriller, directed in the mid-60’s by men I had never heard of before and featuring many of the tropes and techniques of “giallo”, a sub-genre I was not familiar with. A well paced eighty-five minutes later I found myself cross-legged in front of the T.V. and scratching my chin. What I had experienced was a bizarre spiraling dreamscape, not unlike a lot of films I’d been quick to dismiss in the past. It’s a matter of personal taste, I suppose. But, I couldn’t deny quality. The lakeside town where the movie is set with its mysterious inhabitants felt as if it were a real place I had just traveled to, and its gloomy history enthralled me. Undoubtedly, the undefinable feeling lingering in my soul as the credits rolled could only be attributed to one thing: a considerable desire for more.

“The Possessed”, or as it’s referred to in its country of origin, “The Lady of the Lake”, tells the tale of Bernard (Peter Baldwin), a successful novelist who travels to the aforementioned town to clear his mind and possibly get to work on his next book. He’s familiar with the area, having visited it many times with his family as teenager. We soon find out that Bernard vacationed there as recently as a year prior, and during that trip he developed a crush on a maid named Tilde (Virna Lisi) who works at a local hotel. Tilde, its heavy implied, is the real reason he’s returned. After spending a bit of time wandering the streets and conversing with various acquaintances, Bernard asks the hotel owner Enrico (Salvo Randone) about Tilde’s whereabouts. He’s shocked when the man informs him that, in the time since they last saw each other, she’s committed suicide by ingesting poison and then slitting her own throat.

Refusing to believe it, Bernard conducts his own investigation. He’s assisted by a photographer named Francesco, who shows him evidence that suggests she was pregnant when she died. Soon, Bernard begins to experience hallucinations and daydreams about Tilde, and the line between reality and fantasy begins to blur. He gradually becomes obsessed with another woman as well, Adrianna (Pia Langström), who’s married to Enrico’s son Mario (Philippe Leroy) and takes frequent silent walks around the lake at night.

If the plot I’ve described doesn’t sound particularly confusing, allow me to complicate things. The Arrow Video release contains two versions of the movie, an Italian one and an English alternative. At the time, all Italian films were shot without sound and the cast spoke whatever language they wanted. Later on, their lines would be dubbed for distribution. Peter Baldwin, for example, was an American actor and thus his real voice (or what can be assumed to be his real voice) is only heard in the English variant, while the rest of the Italian cast is dubbed by English speakers and their real voices can only be heard in the Italian version. This would all be very normal and not worth explaining, if only difference between the two versions was linguistic. But this is not the case.

For some reason, although the visuals are the same, the subtitles present in the Italian version suggest details about the narrative that deviate wildly in some cases from the English dub, further muddying the waters of what is to be truly believed about the events of the movie. When Bernard arrives in town his motive for doing so is straightforward. He says via voice-over that he’s come to revisit a woman. In the Italian version though, it’s the lake he’s says he’s come to see. In the English version, Enrico’s son Mario is not employed as a butcher. These inconsistencies are easy to ignore. Later however, we are confronted with a massive discrepancy. Francesco the photographer, when theorizing about Tilde’s death with Bernard in English, indicates that he and many others saw her body laying beside the lake before her corpse was removed by an ambulance. This is odd, because in both versions we see Irma, Enrico’s daughter, happening upon Tilde’s body on the bed in her room.

Outside of its narrative the film’s duality is even reflected by its two directors, Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini. Rossellini’s father was the film’s composer and was also the nephew of famed director Roberto Rosellini, the second husband of movie star Ingrid Bergman. Pia Langström, who played Adrianna, was his step-cousin. Although credited as a director the consensus behind the scenes seems to be that he was more of a producer and rarely on set, which is in line with the work he would go on to do. Bazzoni on the other hand, would go on to direct four more films following “The Possessed”, his debut. His two “spaghetti westerns” received the most acclaim apparently.

“The Possessed” is a look at ambiguity and our relationship with that concept as humans who crave objective truth by nature. When it comes to our interactions with others though, especially those we involve ourselves with romantically, objective truth is hard to come by. The Tilde in Bernard’s mind and the Tilde that really was are not the same person. The more he uncovers about her, the less he seems to be interested. In other words, she was a blank slate before and thus someone he could project his desires upon. Once he gets a glimpse of her personal life though, there’s less room to fantasize and so he turns his attention to Adrianna, a new and mysterious woman he knows nothing about.

In the English version, as he departs from the town, Bernard’s voice-over returns to state that what he’s found is “the truth”. The way I see it though, truth is the anthesis of what the movie seemed to be conveying. This is why, of the two versions I prefer the Italian ending. Left with a bunch of mis-matched pieces to a puzzle he’ll never be able to put together, Bernard remarks that the information he’s learned is “incomprehensible” and “distant”. Yeah that’s fair, and honestly, it sounds a lot closer to where I'm at with the whole thing too.