Original title: Il profumo della signora in nero

There have been plenty of strange Italian horror films over the decades, films that don’t play by the accepted rules and which view logic as an inconvenience that can be ignored at whim. One of the very oddest though is The Perfume of a Lady in Black, a wild fever dream that marked the feature length directorial debut of actor Francesco Barilli – he’d directed a short film, Nardino sul Po, as early as 1968 and had written the giallo Chi l’ha vista morire?/Who Saw Her Die? (1972) and Umberto Lenzi’s cannibal film Il paese del sesso selvaggio/Cannibal/Deep River Savages/The Man from Deep River (1972).

The plot is episodic and owes much to Roman Polanski (though in return, Polanski seems to have been inspired, to a degree, by The Perfume of the Lady in Black when he made Le locataire/The Tenant (1976)). In Rome, workaholic Silvia (Mimsy Farmer) barely takes a break from her job at a chemical laboratory, putting strain on her relationship with her insensitive boyfriend Roberto (Maurizio Bonuglia). She’s still haunted by the death of her mother (Renata Zamengo) and starts having hallucinations, seeing her around her apartment and smelling her distinctive perfume. Strange things start to perplex Silvia – a vase from Silvia’s past suddenly turns up in the apartment, a a bouquet of flowers dies unnaturally quickly and she keeps seeing a young girl (Lara Wendel using the pseudonym Daniela Barnes) who she soon realises is her younger self. Is she the victim of a conspiracy that includes her friends and neighbours in the apartment block? Is she being haunted by genuine supernatural forces? Or is she just going insane? Silvia’s search for answers ends with her reenacting her mother’s final moments and a grisly ritual in a network of tunnels beneath the city streets.

Trying to pigeonhole The Perfume of a Lady in Black is a fool’s game. It sometimes looks like a giallo (the poetically convoluted title certainly aligns it to the genre) but at others it looks more like a ghost story. Or is it a conspiracy thriller? Or maybe all three… Whatever it is, it’s unique even in the oddball world of Italian horror. The elliptical plot seems to owe something to Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) and there are hints of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (the adult Silvia is seen reading the book and the young Silvia could be Alice’s blonde-haired sister) but none of these things come close to explaining just how peculiar Barilli’s film is.

Barilli isn’t terribly keen on supplying concrete answers. He leaves us unclear as to whether there really was a conspiracy ranged against Silvia or if she’s just murderously insane from the start. Or indeed if any of what we’re watching is actually happening outside of her damaged psyche. As a result it often feels disjointed and dreamlike. Scenes flow past, often with no connection to each other and the chronological order of the events is hard to determine. There’s no causality in Barilli’s dream world – things just happen and only at the end can we start to determine the connective tissue that holds it all together.

Mimsy Farmer is excellent as the haunted Silvia, giving arguably the best performance in her trilogy of Italian films about young women of dubious sanity – The Perfume of the Lady in Black is sandwiched between Dario Argento’s 4 mosche di velluto grigio/4 Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) and Armando Crispino’s Macchie solari/Autopsy (1975). She brings an ethereal quality to an already other-worldy film, slowly cracking up at the mercy of either genuine supernatural forces or a very human conspiracy – Barilli leaves it up to you to decide. Maurizio Bonuglia is good too as her insensitive jerk of a boyfriend and Mario Scaccia gives a scene-stealing turn as the dotty old neighbour Signor Rossetti who has a never explained fascination with taking Polaroids of hippopotami at the zoo. French actress Nike Arrighi, best remembered perhaps for her turns in the Hammer films The Devil Rides Out (1968) and Countess Dracula (1971), turns up as a blind clairvoyant.

Whatever you make of the plot, it’s hard to deny that the film looks stunning, thanks in part to Mario Masini’s glorious photography and partly thanks to the stunning locations. The apartment block where Silvia lives, in Rome’s Mincio Square, had already been used by Mario Bava in La ragazza che sapeva troppo/The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and would later be pressed into service again as the Thorns’ apartment in The Omen (1976) and the exterior of the library in Argento’s Inferno (1980). The opening shot, the camera pulling out from a close up of a fountain in the square (water and reflective surfaces are recurring motifs throughout the film) to crane up the side of the building to alight on first Rossetti and then Silvia is the equal of anything Argento was doing at the time. Underpinning it all is the shattering, cacophonous score by future Oscar winner (for Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella/Life is Beautiful (1997)) Nicola Piovani, drifting between an unsettling lullaby theme and screeching, atonal strings to often unnerving effect.

And then there’s that ending. It seems to have wandered in from an entirely different film and the context of everything that we’ve seen before makes very little sense but as a jolt to the system it’s undeniably effective. It owes more to the still nascent cannibal and zombie genres than it does to the giallo. If it has any meaning – one might be able to come up with all manner of theories about why the conspiracy literally consumes Silvia’s body – it’s hard to determine but as a final twist of the knife in a very discomfiting film it somehow seems logical and perfect.

Barilli only made one other horror films, the equally odd Pensione paura/Hotel Fear (1978), and on the strength of that and The Perfume of the Lady in Black that’s a matter of great regret. He has a real way with mood and atmosphere and more like this wholly remarkable film would have been most welcome.