Films That Witness Madness

review

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?

WARNING! SLIGHT PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!

Gialli, for all their inherent sleaze and bloodletting, are very rarely disturbing. There's something strangely laughable about their construction and execution. The over-blown set pieces are rife with theatricality and the heaps and mounds of red herrings reduce the whodunit narrative to an exercise in suspension of disbelief, a mental stress test of how far you're willing to go before that suspension stretches too far, snaps and dissolves into inanity. For all their cringe-worthiness, the films of Dario Argento never quite reach the levels of disgust and disturbance they aspire to, all the stabbings, strangulations, ludicrous childhood flashbacks and complicated explanations are all for naught. We're all too aware that what we're seeing is a fake - Argento is theatrical to the extreme - and the narratives, populated with men and women, boys and girls, who are strangely distanced themselves, suffering a severe lack of personality, only bolster our disinterest and disregard. That they are the most popular gialli ever made only highlights the point I wish to make. We tend to enjoy things that we can approach from a safe distance, like the sight of lion in a cage. But when the film strays a bit too close, we get nervous, agitated, our suspension of disbelief no longer able to keep us safe from the reality of the material. The lion is suddenly loose and we, no longer able to rely on that carefully constructed cage for our safety, are at its mercy.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? focuses on Enrico, the gymnastics instructor at a Catholic College for girls. He is married to another school instructor, Herta, but is having an affair with a student, Elizabeth. While they are spending an afternoon together at a nearby lake, Elizabeth sees a young woman being chased through the trees and the flash of a knife. The next day, the young woman is found dead, stabbed through the vagina and left to bleed to death. The news is delivered at the school by Instructor Barth. Enrico is targeted as a suspect thanks to a pen he accidentally dropped at the lake when he and Elizabeth were there that afternoon - for obvious reasons, he did not willingly reveal this bit of information to the police. As more girls are murdered, Elizabeth begins to piece together the quick flashes of information she gathered that afternoon and comes to the realization that the murderer was dressed as a priest. She is soon drowned in a bathtub while waiting for Enrico to come and join her. Now personally vested in the killer's capture, Enrico and his wife begin sorting through all the various details and come to the conclusion that all the murders revolve around a specific group of girls and may have something to do with the sudden disappearance of someone in their clique, a young woman named Solange.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? is one of the most disturbing gialli ever made. It is easily one of the greatest. It is a film about sexuality. Many giallo filmmakers were anti-clerical - or at the very least, harbored deeply anti-religious sentiments - as evidenced in films like WHO SAW HER DIE?, DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, and countless others where priests have been killers, serious suspects, or worse. The killer in WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? masquerades as a priest, punishing these young, sexually active girls in a way that carries the destructive and painfully misguided Catholic fears of sexuality to their logical extreme. Our hero, Enrico, is clearly meant to be seen as a decent man, not because he is immune to his sexual urges - he isn't, his affair with Elizabeth is testimony to that - but because he hasn't acted on them. Elizabeth, we are told, dies a virgin. Of all the victims, only she is spared the horrible fate of vaginal impalement. She is drowned in the bathtub, her lifeless body curling up into a fetal position as it floats in the water. The symbolism on display here is unmistakable.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? is also a film about rape, not just of the physical variety but of innocence, of trust, of youth. The film manages to portray the emotional and physical violence of rape in one unforgettable and nauseating shot of an x-ray taken of a murder victim, the foot-long blade still protruding from her vagina. While many films - quite a few of them American, like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and MS. .45 - tend to regard rape as an outrage made palatable by the medium, there is no such relief in WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?. The violent rape presented in this film is as vicious and merciless a punishment as you are likely to find and is never designed to be anything less. It is a terrible thought and a horrible vision to behold.

Abortion, always a hot button issue regardless of the decade, provides the murderer with a motive - his daughter, Solange, was impregnated at a sex party thrown by her girlfriends and they accompanied her to an abortionist, the procedure leaving her traumatized and in a state of infantile regression - but it the loss of innocence that provides the true outrage. This sentiment runs throughout the entirety of the film. "A girl of eighteen is not a child, though it might be better if they were", the killer says, perhaps with his own daughter, now practically catatonic, on his mind. The medical examiner reports Elizabeth's autopsy findings to Barth saying "she was still a virgin... and when those school teachers find out they'll put up a statue to her." His only response is a firm "bloody well should". Catholicism and Christianity make no bones about their treatment of sex outside of marriage - depending on the sect, you're likely to be told that, as a sin, it is in the same league as murder - and this viewpoint, absolutely male, poisons the entire film.

Even the abortion, the entire crux of the film, is twisted by this viewpoint. We are given two conflicting representations of the abortion. The first, a pseudo-flashback narrated by one of the girls, presents the group taking Solange to the abortionist. She tells us that they were "able to persuade her" into getting the abortion. The second comes at the films finale where we are told that the girls "put the girl through an abortion against her own will". These two reports obviously don't match up - for those of you with access to the DVD, watch the scene again (it occurs at 1:35:30) and pay attention to Solange's only line of dialogue in the entire scene - and it becomes obvious that Barth's interpretation is somewhat misguided. Whatever the outcome, the choice always belonged to Solange and Barth's declaration that they "put her through an abortion against her own will" seems to be nothing more than his own reading of the facts, a demonstration that he is incapable of reconciling his belief that women should be virtuous - "bloody well should" put up a statue for a girl being a virgin - and only virtuous. It's impossible for him to imagine someone enjoying the act of sex and willingly taking responsibility for their actions when things go wrong. Everyone in the film shares the same line of thinking, including the killer who seeks revenge not so much for his daughter's mental illness but for his daughter's spoiled innocence.

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