My introduction to the giallo was the work of Dario Argento, a true master of the craft. But there’s a rich landscape of earlier more niche entries into the genre that I’ve also slowly been chipping away at. These movies are largely campy and over-the-top, with stylized slasher elements, gratuitous nudity and sexual content, and insane (sometimes inane) plot twists.

They’re especially of interest to me in terms of *surprise* production design. By virtue of being created in Italy during the heyday of Italian radical design circa ‘65-’75, gialli are visual playgrounds for a design freak like me. Their stylish settings reflect not only the modern tastes of the characters but also the thematic currents of alienation & psychological unease that run through the films.

When the mood strikes, I’ll go on a little giallo binge, and on one such spree I was blessed by an apparition: an incredible piece of Roman postmodernism from the late 1960s, a building known as Casa Papanice. My first exposure came with a watch of The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971) dir. Sergio Martino.

The house revealed itself to me first from inside, all striped undulations and concentric protrusions. Designed in 1966 by architect Paolo Portoghesi and engineer Victor Gigliotti, Casa Papanice melds Baroque & Art Nouveau inspirations with Biomorphic, Deco & Space Age elements. Portoghesi was commissioned by his patron Pasquale Papanice to design the building and also cultivated much of its interior furniture & fixtures.

One of the most show-stopping amongst these: a round blue & green velvet sofa unit. Almost like a conversation pit couch that got un-sunk, it echoes the repeated circular forms of the space and matches the central color scheme of the apartment walls.

Obsessed with the striped curtains that continue into the painted bands of the walls.

Space Age doors, walls that wiggle, and wood panel accents that speak to the building’s organic influences. Shoutout to the scream queen Edwige Fenech. Here she plays the wife of an Austrian diplomat who’s got a dirty little secret.

In The Secret Vice of Mrs. Wardh, we get a peek at Casa Papanice’s bathroom. Note the recurring blues, greens and circular forms in the tiles.

TSVoMW also shows off a pull-out mirrored room divider that closes off the hallway and separates the living room from the rest of the floor.

On to the bedroom. We’ve switched to vertical stripes! This time in a warmer color scheme that more closely mirrors the strips of multi-tonal wood slat paneling throughout the apartment. There’s a Space Age plastic red & white bed and matching, or at least thoughtfully paired, chair (part of a set also found in the living room). The chairs, red telephone and blue orb lamp will make cameos in the other movies.

The next giallo I turned on, and I mean like double-feature-hit-PLAY-NEXT, also featured the iconic Casa Papanice interior: The Red Queen Kills 7 Times (1972), dir. Emilio Miraglia. Serendipity!

This one more clearly highlights the apartment’s various fixtures in both daylight and nighttime contexts. Like the pretty blue & white veined wall sconces!

Set in the world of fashion, The Red Queen has a surplus of additional prop styling beyond the objects consistent to the C.P. in all three films. Lots of Space Age table lamps and kinetic sculptural objects.

Plus we get a better look at those pod-like doors which seem to have been customized with a gorgeous marbled application of blue & green paint on each glass panel.

I die for the overhead concentric ceiling lamp fixture.

A more detailed look at the molded white plastic bed, with integrated storage in the headboard. And there goes the blue orb lamp again!

Feeling inspired by my fortuitous Casa Papanice double billing I looked into whether it showed up in any other films and found the one that started it all (that is, the first movie to feature it as a set) — Dramma della gelosia (1970), dir. Ettore Scola.

This movie is very much not a giallo. It’s hard to characterize, a sort of romantic-satirical tragicomedy, and it stars Monica Vitti, Marcello Mastroianni & Giancarlo Giannini. Casa Papanice shows up as the home of a wealthy butcher.

Dramma della gelosia offers probably the most clear & comprehensive documentation of the space’s built-in features and bespoke decorative items.

The full effect of the repetitive concentric elements — from the fireplace, to the dining room ceiling lamp, to the pedestal of the dining table, to that columnar hyperboloid floor lamp — is really a sight to behold. Also matching blue-green shag floor rug 🤌

We start to work our way outwards. The curtains have been removed to reveal a capsule-like solarium that looks out on the balcony.

The genius and harmony of Paolo Portoghesi’s design scheme continues to unfurl. The shape of the tulip space age chairs tapers in similar proportions to many of the other interior fixtures. Majolica tile bands in gold, green, white and blue on the building’s exterior pick up the shape and orientation of the interior wood panels in a new application of the interior color story.

We zoom out further and finally get a glimpse of the exterior — stacked circular balconies and staggered metal pipe railing. Another iteration of the cylinder theme.

A slideshow presentation of Vitti shot around the building offers additional vantage points.

And finally a glimpse of the house at street level.

How lucky am I to have come across this architectural gem basically on accident!

The status report on Casa Papanice today is that it now houses the Jordanian Embassy in Rome. After years of passing through the hands of multiple owners, the tubular fencing was removed and an exterior staircase & rooftop structure demolished. There isn’t much hope for a careful preservation of its interior elements either. In a March 2023 interview with Portoghesi, he sadly described the interiors as “destroyed” :( It’s very fortunate indeed that the building has been so robustly documented in its original form via moving pictures. I can’t wait to dig into more research on Portoghesi as it seems there are thankfully still many surviving works of his around Italy.

A final easter egg for those of you who read this far… this still from The Red Queen Kills 7 Times. Redacted to make it not a full-on nudie 🌚

Until next time!
xo Mona

Time-lapse via technicolor birthday cakes in Heaven Can Wait (1943),
dir. Ernst Lubitsch.

Bad things happen at a birthday party in The Birds (1963), dir. Alfred Hitchcock.

Another time lapse through cake. Victims of Sin (1951), dir. Emilio Fernández.

Big Daddy’s birthday cake in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), dir. Richard Brooks.

Italian dystopian future visions of a pre-9/11 NYC — as a birthday cake. 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), dir. Enzo G. Castellari.

Four friends decide to gorge themselves to death in La Grande Bouffe (1973), dir. Marco Ferreri. Ornate cakes and decadent treats aplenty.

Those last ones I think are actually puddings but were too gorgeous and breast-shaped not to feature. They remind me of Cassatella di Sant’Agata, sicilian pastries honoring Saint Agatha and the… interesting way she was martyred.

A voyeuristic encounter during a 21st birthday party leads to a doomed friendship in Peeping Tom (1960), dir. Michael Powell.

Brothel birthday party on the American Frontier in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), dir. Robert Altman.

Virna Lisi emerges from a large decorative cake like Venus on the Half-Shell. How To Murder Your Wife (1965), dir. Richard Quine. Yes, as the title would indicate, this movie is hopelessly sexist.

A truly terrible movie with a fun party scene involving an oversized cake crawling with sexy frosted cake nymphs. Pussycat, Pussycat I Love You (1970) dir. Rod Amateau. I cannot in good faith recommend this movie.

Another girl, another cake to pop out of. Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), dir. Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen.

Sometimes you don’t pop out of the cake, but you do fall into it. The Great Race (1965), dir. Blake Edwards. This movie is too long.

Technically this is an enormous pie fight but the candy-colored frosting is sending mixed messages. I like that by the end of this sequence, the kitchen/war zone looks like an abstract expressionist canvas. Crazy prop frosting swathed on thick like gouache.

The icon Setsuko Hara shows two very different cake moods.
Early Summer (1951), dir. Yasujirō Ozu. Late Spring (1949), dir. Yasujirō Ozu.

Isabelle Adjani in Deadly Circuit (1983), dir. Claude Miller. I wrote about this film briefly here.

Sometimes your cake is concealing an explosive device meant to kill James Bond. Diamonds are Forever (1971), dir. Guy Hamilton.

Amazing period piece banquet spreads in Amadeus (1984), dir. Miloš Forman. Note the chocolate treble clefs.

The queen of cakes and letting people eat ‘em! Marie Antoinette (2006), dir. Sofia Coppola. The food styling in this movie is fantastic.

Marie’s own birthday cake with enormous spun sugar ornaments, orchids and sparklers? Unreal.

Another GOAT period piece for production design via on-screen meals. The Age of Innocence (1993), dir. Martin Scorsese. A petit-four is a little cake to me!!!

The scion of a wealthy family’s birthday, presented in an opening credit sequence of home movie footage, and then later in present-day as the movie’s events unfold. The Game (1997), dir. David Fincher.

Make a wish. My queen Isabelle Huppert in The Lacemaker (1997), dir. Claude Goretta. Also wrote a few thoughts about this in my opening post for Mixed Fruits.

Until next time!
xo Mona

Pauline at the Beach (1983), dir. Éric Rohmer

Obsessed with everything Arielle Dombasle wears in this movie.

Obviously lots of time is spent at the eponymous beach. Manifesting a day where I enjoy beach time and swimwear.

Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987), dir. Éric Rohmer

Sophie Renoir = major slay. The wardrobe throughout is a lot of simple color blocking and integrating graphic elements through pattern.

Finally these summer soirée vibes~~ so good

The Green Ray (1986), dir. Éric Rohmer

Marie Rivière’s character Delphine is my summer break wet blanket mood incarnate oops! I am what I am. But if there’s hope for her maybe there is for me too.

Across the board Rohmer makes me want to wear more bright colors this summer.

Ultimately since I’m spending the summer in the city it’s the city-based looks that speak to me the most!

This is the true summer energy, personnellement.

With a dash of optimism to shake out of my stubborn summer bummer city curmudgeon ways :)

Until next time!
xo Mona

However outlandishly staged this bedroom decor may appear it’s also very much rooted in popular design trends of the time, which set me on a mission to track down other contemporary movies showcasing inflatable furniture.

I was first compelled to re-watch Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 (1969). Now this one is also not a particularly “good” movie. It’s effectively a soft-core porno, but it has more depth than you’d expect from the genre, transposing the plot of Dumas’ The Lady of the Camellias to swinging sixties Rome. The setting provides a rich backdrop of Italian design trends - plastic fantastic and pneumatic design objects abound. As an added bonus the film has a terrific score by Piero Piccioni.

The inflatable props here engage even more directly with a language of contemporary design culture. Camille is a kept woman, a courtesan who surrounds herself with all the signifiers of taste, modernity and sexual liberation. Could the transparency of their materials signify the superficiality of her lifestyle until she discovers true love?

From there I went on a brief side quest looking into how exactly inflatables came to be a bonafide design vocabulary. The proliferation of plastics in the Space Age / Pop Art aesthetic of the mid-to-late 1960s coincided with numerous experiments in art & architecture building utopian blow-up environments. It was only a matter of time until furniture pieces became pneumatic too.

A note on inflatables & utopia — a beautiful dream isn’t it, to be floating on or in air? You’ll often see these elements at play in the production design for sci-fi or fantasy films set in the future. A great example - Roger Vadim’s 1968 Jane Fonda vehicle Barbarella.

Another good example - Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim from 1965. While set in the near future it features a more true-to-the-1960s visual universe (despite the whole dystopian bloodsport-meets-population control premise) and the seats in the scene below seem almost to predict the advent of inflatable furniture as a design trend.

One of the biggest shifts IRL occurs in 1967-1968 when Vietnamese-French engineer and designer Quasar Khanh drops his Aerospace furniture line, an 11-piece inflatable PVC collection.

Pneumatic plastic sculptures become not only actual design items but luxury lifestyle objects once Khanh’s products take the design world by storm.

In ‘67 Missoni even presented their spring-summer collection at a fashion show mounted at a Milanese swimming pool with Khanh’s inflatable furnishings serving as important set pieces.

Around the same you also have the Italian design company Zanotta positing inflatables as consumer products in a big way with their famous Blow Chair.

Where I had a harder time identifying any Khanh inflatables in my plastic filmic odyssey, I was able to find multiple Blow Chairs and other Zanotta fare2 in the 1968 Italian sex comedy La Matriarca by Pasquale Festa Campanile. Side-note: this movie too has a great score.

The picture-perfect Italian bourgeois housewife (at least on the surface), Mimi moves through domestic spaces in the film that are positively stuffed with Zanotta objects.

Beyond the Zanotta-mania, there are a few additional instances of pneumatic furniture.

No solid ID on the inflatable poufs but they do bear a slight resemblance to these pieces by Bernard Quentin for the NY World’s Fair in ‘64.

I have a feeling the striped orange inflatable pillow might be Mass Art Products by Philip Orenstein.

By the early seventies the blow-up furniture craze started to deflate as people realized the PVC would yellow, seams would split, cushions would leak… the fantasy of floating on air ultimately shook out to be a case of style over substance. Molded hard plastics on the other hand would hold their ground for decades to follow despite their own set of material limitations.

Have a look at some images from one of my favorite coffee table books — longtime Bloomingdale’s window decorator Barbara D’Arcy’s Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating from 1973.

Of course, my fellow millennials will remember that the tides shifted back in the late 90s and early 2000s to a brand new inflatable era, especially targeted at the pre-teen/teen girl demographic. A design bubble once burst was blown right back up again 🫧🫧🫧

Movies mentioned in this post:
L’Écume Des Jours (1968), dir. Charles Belmont
Camille 2000 (1969), dir. Radley Metzger
Barbarella (1968), dir. Roger Vadim
The 10th Victim (1965), dir. Elio Petri
La Matriarca (1968), dir. Pasquale Festa Campanile

Until next time!
xo Mona

The first moment happens in Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight (1939) - there’s a rather brief scene set in a hat shop and it’s one of my all-time favorite movie representations of a retail space.

There’s a De Chirico-esque quality to the shadowy, dramatically perspectival landscape on the walls.

The next set design moment comes from a movie made almost a decade later, Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947). I was completely blown away by this set for a fictional nightclub called The Silver Dove.

A sort of Atlantis/underwater ruins theme — with frozen rippling ribbons, fragmented classical columns and coral-like ornament all throughout. Not sure where the eponymous dove is supposed to figure in.

I immediately thought of Dali, especially his Dream of Venus Pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair (something about those faux-coral protrusions).

A touch of Schiaparelli even in the flying ribbon tails?

My own free associations sent me on a deep dive into just how pervasive these aesthetic tendencies were in contemporary visual culture at large.

Fashion was the frontier for injecting Surrealist imagery into the mainstream, with Dali & Schiaparelli leading the charge and prestige fashion publications commissioning artists to make dreamlike cover images.

As much as fashion is about artistic expression it’s also about consumerism. So naturally advertising on the whole followed suit and started to pull from the surrealist lexicon. This proved especially useful for products like fragrance, cosmetics and lingerie where how much you could show through a visual medium like print was somewhat limited when it came to literal representation. Surrealism taught ad execs that metaphors could also sell. Plus it’s infinitely sexier to sell the stuff of dreams, as opposed to just plain stuff.

By the 1940s, Surrealism had surpassed the parameters of mere artistic influence and became a full-fledged framework to shill all kinds of fantasies and identities. Its motifs had turned into signifiers for modernity, femininity, luxury, escape. Now not so much avant-garde, the surreal was completely normalized as a commercial vocabulary (TBH that shift was huge and its impact has lasted up to today).

All this surrealist advertising research led me to my next discovery, the 1940s print campaigns of a brand called Textron advertising intimate apparel - nightgowns, pyjamas and the like.

These ads are wackaDOODLE and absolutely sublime. Textron still exists but their apparel line folded by 1950 and now they’re a major aerospace and defense industrial conglomerate LOL.

I’d be remiss not to also mention that a significant space for the intersection of Surrealism and Capitalism was the department window display. So much so that in 1939 Dali even designed a window for the now-defunct NYC retail chain Bonwit Teller.

The spaces I cited at the beginning of this post from Leisen and Sirk are cinematic distillations of the moment they came from. Beyond window display it appears physical retail at the time certainly shifted to a more immersive gallery-like experience, nightclubs and restaurants too even to a certain extent, but obviously the Hollywood version was more a exaggerated and stylized space than reality. Another dream being sold one might say.

Until next time!
xo Mona

No spoilers ahead but a few loose details from the movies’ expositions will be mentioned!

The most obvious thing Lovers & Four Nights share is their basic premise - they’re two love stories centered around chance encounters on Paris’ oldest bridge, the Pont-Neuf.

A bridge is interstitial. Its function is to connect two separate places. Such in-betweenness is a fitting backdrop for the aimless lovers of these films to cross paths and themselves connect.

These encounters happen largely at night - the time when an illuminated Paris glitters and reflects along the surface of the Seine. It’s a gorgeous moody shimmering world where the Pont-Neuf seems to summon those who wander to meet, share their deepest vulnerabilities and fall in love under the protective cover of night.

Both films to varying degrees explore the notion of love as obsession, as delusion, as madness.

I also found it interesting that each film features a protagonist who is a painter. The lover’s gaze <=> the artist’s gaze

The two heroines are magnetic on screen and it’s easy to see why their partners fall for them. There is a damsel in distress element present in both relationship dynamics as well.

For all their similarities these are also two very different movies.

The Lovers on the Bridge is brash and rapturous - things feel loud and always in motion, with very high highs and very low lows. Four Nights of a Dreamer is more meditative and quietly melancholy2. Both are a gut punch.

If you are based in NYC, Four Nights of a Dreamer recently got its own 4K restoration which is currently playing at Film Forum. I’ll gladly be showing up to the theatre for a rewatch :o)

Until next time!
xo Mona

Until next time!
xo Mona

Inspiration (1949) dir. Karel Zeman — a crystalline little confection made in stop-motion.

Can-Can (1960) dir. Walter Lang —notable mostly for this musical sequence. Short clip below.

Shout out to the psychedelic Lautrec-y opening credit illustrations too.

Until next time!
xo Mona

7. Deadly Circuit (1983) dir. Claude Miller

   

   

   

   What starts out as a kind of goofy 80’s cat-and-mouse crime thriller becomes something more complicated and perverse once the characters’ pathologies begin to unfurl. Isabelle Adjani is in full femme fatale mode with lots of fun outfit changes.
   
   

8. Mr. Klein (1976) dir. Joseph Losey

   

   

   

   A bleak and compelling take on the film noir trope of mistaken identity set in WWII Occupied Paris. Bonus that my queen Juliet Berto ❤️ is here in a minor but impactful role, not to mention the appearance by Jeanne Moreau.
   
   

9. Full Moon in Paris (1984) dir. Éric Rohmer

   

   

   

   Surprise — Rohmer makes another appearance on the list. This time starring Bulle Ogier’s daughter Pascale as a restless young Parisian making mistakes in life and love. Somehow heartbreak feels good in a place like this2. Very fun snapshot of 1980s Parisian youth and nightlife!!
   
   

10. La Cérémonie (1995) dir. Claude Chabrol

    

    

    

    Twisted sisters. TW this one gets pretty dark. I love how thorny and complex the class critique at the center of the film is, plus there are some truly LOL moments from Isabelle Huppert.

    
    

11. Girls of the Night (1961) dir. Kinuyo Tanaka

    

    

    

    A former sex worker navigates re-integrating into “normal” society following the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law. Directed by the second *ever* Japanese woman to work as a film director. This one touched me and it also captures a really interesting moment in post-war Japan.
    
    

12. Gang of Four (1989) dir. Jacques Rivette

    

    

    

    More theatre and conspiracy from Rivette. I like what I like! I should note for the unacquainted, Rivette’s movie runtimes are not for the faint of heart i.e. almost always at least 3 hours. But hey, this is one of his “shorter” ones (2h40) 🤣
    

Thus concludes my list!
See you next time
xo Mona

On the eve of the new year I found it appropriate to present a list of 12 movies I streamed2 in 2024 that left an impression on me. Just a few shots and words for each film in this inaugural post as I’m sure many of them I will feel the need to show and tell even more in their own dedicated posts.

Presented in no particular order except for the first, which I watched the most recently and can’t stop thinking about. Some common threads seem to run throughout — namely, they are overwhelmingly French (oops) with tinges of the melancholy and/or morbid. Sorry if you are looking for something feel-good ♡

1. The Lacemaker (1977) dir. Claude Goretta

   

   

   

   And this is why we put respect on Isabelle Huppert’s name. She has been devastating us on screen for 50 years. Her performance of the shy, inscrutable Béatrice is moving and perfect. I have so much more to say and share about this soon.
   
   

2. Love on the Ground (1984) dir. Jacques Rivette

   

   

   

   I adore Rivette and have been steadily working my way through his whole filmography. So many of the quintessential Rivette elements are here - female leads plunged into realms of mystery, magic and paranoia, the volleys and echoes between theatre and “reality”... The set design in this one deserves its own post as most of the film is set in an eccentric playwright’s bonkers postmodern mansion.
   
   

3. The Strangler (1970) dir. Paul Vecchiali

   

   

   

   A weird little french giallo steeped in a more sincere sense of sadness and pathos than I find in the traditional Italian genre. The psychosexual motivations of the characters feel very distinctly French lol.
   
   

4. The Deep End (2001) dir. David Siegel & Scott McGehee

   

   

   

   A surprisingly poignant thriller meets melodrama that is grounded by Tilda Swinton and Goran Visnjic’s performances. It made me feel things 💧
   
   

5. The Aviator's Wife (1981) dir. Éric Rohmer

   

   

   

   Classic bittersweet, romantic Rohmer! J’adore Anne-Laure Meury as the charismatic teenage gamine and wish she had been in more asides from her few appearances in the RCU3.
   
   

6. Morvern Callar (2002) dir. Lynne Ramsay

   

   

   

   Sad, weird and beautiful with Samantha Morton as a protagonist of questionable ethics who you can’t help but root for. I’m obsessed with the final scene.

Well folks, the length of going through the first six of the list feels like enough for one post so it looks like I will be splitting the dozen into two. I’ll see you in the new year with the final six recommendations from my 2024 watches.

xo Mona