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Murders are happening all over town, and inspector Moretti (Luis Emilio
Rodriguez) ties them to Francesca, a very "bad" young girl in
the rather literal sense of the word, who has disappeared without a trace
15 years ago. But Francesca's wheelchair-bound father Vittorio Visconti
(Raul Gederlini) is the country's leading expert in terms of Dante's Divine
Comedy, and it seems all the murders are oddly linked to that book.
Thing is, even if he's soon able to spot Divine Comedy references
at a mile and a half distance, that doesn't bring Moretti any closer to
the killer let alone enables him to predict when and where he or she might
fight back - to the point where possible witnesses are slaughtered before
they even can testify. and then Moretti's sidekick Succo (Gustavo
Dalessanro) is found dead in his apartment, an apparent suicide, and
there's plenty of evidence to suggest he's the murderer. Now Moretti
doesn't believe that to be true for even a minute (and the audience knows
it's false), and to prove it wrong he goes after the one hint of a clue he
has ... but might just as well walk into a trap ... If you ever
want to see a perfect homage to Italian giallo cinema from the 1970s, it's
definitely Francesca: This is a movie that isn't just done copying
the style and colour charts of yesteryear, it really gets the props and
sets just right, the camerawork has a vintage twang to it, the actors
"look" as if they're from the 1970s, and so do their costumes,
and even the editing isn't merely post-modern but really old-fashioned.
Plus, this is a film that really understands the genre, the story's
properly intertwined and full of unlikely coincidents, there are plenty of
creepy accessoires serving the audience as (real and false) clues as to
what might be happening, there are eerie dream sequences that might not
make a lot of sense other than add to the atmosphere, and the murders are
all suitably brutal. That all said, the movie's not all perfect, it just
lacks any real characters to identify with (or to properly despise), but
that said, rarely has a nostalgia genre movie looked and felt even half as
(darkly) beautiful!
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