Giorgino
- 1994
- 2h 57m
October 1918: After returning to the civil life, the young Doctor Giorgio Volli searches for a group of children, which he had been the care-taker of before the first world war began. Howeve... Read allOctober 1918: After returning to the civil life, the young Doctor Giorgio Volli searches for a group of children, which he had been the care-taker of before the first world war began. However, soon the searching becomes a part of hide-and-seek with death. Giorgio finds a village ... Read allOctober 1918: After returning to the civil life, the young Doctor Giorgio Volli searches for a group of children, which he had been the care-taker of before the first world war began. However, soon the searching becomes a part of hide-and-seek with death. Giorgio finds a village bordered with a treacherous marsh and rumours of wolves. There he also meets the mysteriou... Read all
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- TriviaLaurent Boutonnat's first feature film after directing many music videos for 10 years.
Funnily, nowadays its main subjects, such as femininity, mental health or a glum folk revision of religion, are the core pillars of almost any prominent horror title (just as the very method of filming a horror movie the way it basically becomes a social story with esoteric decorations). The movie is actually quite successful at binding all of its topics together and rhyming them with each other. You'd guess this is how an isolated village of First World War Europe would look and feel, with women taking control and justice into their own hands, putting away the traditional, subdued role both in the plot and the narrative. It's almost always the guys who are shown vulnerable, sick, and weakened; it's an old crippled priest who becomes the young doctor's connoisseur and someone to share candies with, that the dead children didn't get, it's the master of the old manor who loses his mind and barely comprehends what is happening around him.
The men's wing of the madhouse is probably the scariest part of this supposedly supernatural Gothic movie, not least due to the absurd, tragicomical chaos of war. In fact, even before Giorgino, Boris Vian and The King in Yellow made me think it's something about the French culture to find social collapse simultaneously horrendous and hilarious. Even the main story sometimes looks quite ridiculous - the riot of a disturbed girl and a retired soldier on his last legs against the tired women, embittered by winter and anxious loneliness. It is still tragic all right, though, and the global nature of the movie makes this tragedy of a girl unfit for these tough times even more touching. In fact, her fate echoes for me the novel "The Fiery Angel" written by Russian author Valeriy Bryusov shortly before the Russian Revolution. It is about a young woman in a wrong time period (whose name, surprisingly, isn't Tristana but instead just Renata) whose madness brings her into the dungeons of a German Inquisition of the XVI century and... and I won't tell you whether her beloved soldier comes in time to rescue her or not. This question is answered in the book.
Like Mylène's heroine here, Renata was a special, rare, Ophelia the maneater. Even drowning in scraps of lyrics, she drove men crazy, and there was little good waiting for all of them. Although, despite starting Giorgino mainly because of her, here, unlike in Ghostland, I didn't only feel invested when she was on screen, and that's another good sign. Funnily, it's Ghostland, a trans-insensitive exploit horror, that looks much older than its time although it plays with the tropes of horror just as consciously and no less enthusiastically than Giorgino, and is equally hard to criticise and evaluate properly - because what can you do with a chameleon movie changing its genre on the way, right?
- hvsams
- Nov 30, 2023
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- Budget
- €12,000,000 (estimated)