Four Flies On Grey Velvet 4K 1971 ITALIAN

"Four Flies on Grey Velvet" crowns Argento's so-called animal collection, of which I found "The Cat with Nine Tails" the most successful, "The Bird with Crystal Plumage" not bad, but unimpressive. "Four Flies..." is by far what I would call the maestro's strangest painting.

The musician killed a man completely by accident and in a ridiculous way. This strange person was following him and in the musician's attempt to find out why, by some strange body movements and his own knife - and here this strange person in black lies down in the orchestra pit. The moment of the murder was filmed by an even stranger person in a puppet mask. Now this person will not get away from the musician, somehow she gets into his house, leaves him presents and threats, and as it happens there is a number of murders of people close to the musician in one way or another...

The plot above is a bit muddled and contrived, but that's exactly what the film is. The story is twitchy, interspersed with a lot of repeated bizarre dreams and other inserts which seem to be based on the characters' past experiences and feelings. The ending is reduced to psychologism with a touch of psychodelic, although the slow motion at the very end is incredibly on point, a pleasure to watch. Also incredibly liked the scene in the park, in the green labyrinth - wonderful!

"4 Flies..." is a very strange film, dragging, in some places almost with a drug-like feeling (although the theme of drugs is not touched upon) - dreams, some flashbacks, the general turmoil of the plot create a similar atmosphere. There's Chekhov the parrot, and a certain person whom the protagonist calls God, and the professor (who are these people? How does the protagonist know them?), and the hissing cat (why was it treated like that?!), and the homosexual private detective, and the poor letter carrier... a lot of contrived, mixed up characters, many parallel storylines, most of which remain unrevealed, but the humor, at least a little, still has its place. Many moments remain unclear, even the motives of the main villain I did not immediately understand (although, perhaps, this is the cost of the terrible translation). Everything is presented in some smeared strokes.

"Four Flies on Grey Velvet" leaves rather ambiguous impressions and stands apart from other Argento's pictures, because I didn't see such a psychodelic stuff in the other ones. I would not dare to recommend it, the film is very amateur, except for the fans of Dario you can look at.