CINEMA: Trevor Steele-Taylor
MICHELE SOAVI’S magnificent Della Morte Dell Amore, which has crept on to the circuit at the 8 Cult Cinema in Rosebank, is likely to creep as shyly off the circuit if last Saturday night’s audience of four is anything to go by. Sad — for this is a hugely entertaining and visually splendid rococo tale of doomed love set in the shaded groves of an Italian
Soavi, who began his career as an assistant to Dario Argento (director of such classics of the bizarre as Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Suspiria), has attracted a faithful following in Europe and the United States. This popularity has, as yet, to cross the equator, it
Dellamorte, “the Della Francesca of Death”, is played by British actor Rupert Graves. Laconic and ill- tempered, he reigns over the cemetery of which he is the keeper, dispatching corpses, which have taken to rising on the third day after their burial, with bullets or a spade through the skull.
Two love stories interweave. Dellamorte’s love affair is with the young wife of a buried roue, the alpha of which is consummated on the gravestone of her dead husband and the omega of which is reached when she resurrects and tries to eat him.
Dellamorte’s dumb assistant has his love affair too. Given to vomiting on the objects of his desire, the girl with whom he falls in love has her head parted from her body by a runaway busload of boy scouts. His love play with the cannabilistic head of his beloved is romance of an extreme nature, worthy of the paintings of Gustav Moreau.
His film bloody but in no way gruesome, Soavi employs the lightest of touches in dealing with decay and things temporal. He has a visual style that is both cinematic and distinctive, and a fine sense of graveyard humour.