Two Father’s Days ago, my loving wife gave me a copy of David Lebovitz’s Drinking French as a present. It’s a terrific book filled with wonderful recipes, but far and away our favorite thing in it is the Yellow Cocktail created by Franck Audoux of the Paris bar Cravan. Here’s the recipe
3/4 oz. London dry gin (Cayuga Gold Barrel Gin)
3/4 oz. Suze
3/4 oz. Yellow Chartreuse
3/4 oz. Freshly squeezed Lemon juice
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake with ice until well chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe glass and garnish with the oils from a lemon twist.
Lebovitz calls for London dry gin, but we prefer to use one of our favorite local spirits, Myer Farm Distillers‘ Cayuga Gold Barrel Gin, which has a similar golden hue to the other ingredients. “Autumnal,” the person at Red Feet Wine Market who sold us our last bottle said, which really is the perfect way to describe it. With that connection made, it was pretty much inevitable that I would end up choosing a movie directed by master of the giallo (Italian for “yellow”) film Dario Argento to go with it, although I decided not to select something from that genre. Instead I’m keying in on the drink’s vibrant yellow color and pairing it with Suspiria. Here’s a picture of my copy of Synapse Film’s DVD release of the film:
Suspiria doesn’t appear to be streaming many places, but some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library.
I mention color above, and that is what I like most about this film. Maitland McDonagh describes it as a “big, bright, nightmare fairy tale” set in “a psychedelic world of swirling red, yellow, and blue jewel-tones” in her book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, and I wouldn’t dare try to say it better myself. When I was an undergraduate film studies student, I remember numerous occasions when I fell in love with the idea of a movie based on the pictures in my text books, only to be disappointed by the reality of it, usually because it was either disappointingly conventional outside of the extraordinary moments captured by the stills that inspired me to see it, or because the film didn’t really work. Suspiria avoids these traps by using a simple narrative structure as a stable scaffold for pervasive formal audacity.
On the first front, voice-over dialogue informs us during the opening credits that once upon a time a dancer named Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) “decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous school of dance in Europe.” Alas, the “celebrated academy of Freiburg” turns out to be a front for a coven of witches. Through pluck and courage she triumphs over their leader and brings the whole place down House of Usher style. That’s about it for the story. But my Godard (RIP), the images! We can begin as the film (almost) does, with shots drenched in primary colors. This one comes first:
But this one is even more red:
Beautiful right? But not terribly innovative. That’s true of this shot as well, which reminds me of the oft-mentioned-on-this-blog Chicago bar The Violet Hour:
What really makes the film interesting are all the moments that it isn’t quite possible to capture. Take this one:
This is a murderer stalking his prey shot from behind, and it doesn’t last long enough to get a screengrab that shows him clearly enough to figure this out without a prompt. Or how about this shot?
I’m sure you’ll agree that it is very green. But there’s something else funny about it as well, yeah? It’s not an unusual lens–rather, the camera is set up behind a light bulb:
Far from being a film comprised of beautiful tableaus loosely connected by a plot, Suspiria is much greater than the sum of its (occasionally breathtaking, to be sure!) parts. Sometimes this is accomplished via gimmicks, as in the case of this unmotivated reaper-shaped shadow:
I thought something similar was going on in the opening scene at the airport. It features two extreme close-ups of the inner workings of an automatic door, and I assumed that in at least one of them the machinery was switched out for a knife. But no:
Why go to the trouble if just the metal and the motion achieve the same effect? In any event, it’s everything else going on around these shots that really count. To deal with the latter scene first, the juxtaposition of ambient noise when Suzy is inside the airport:
with Italian band Goblin’s eerie prog rock score whenever we catch a glimpse of the world outside kicks everything off on an extremely unsettling note. See also this awesome use of a wind machine:
In the case of the forest where the above shadow appears, what I really remember is the haunting image of Eva Axén’s Pat Hingle running through it as seen by Suzy through the window of a cab:
My single favorite part of Suspiria is probably the ridiculous statement Barbara Magnolfi’s Olga (right) makes to Suzy (middle) and Stefania Casini’s Sara (left) which I think I heard sampled in Atmosphere’s “Bird Sings Why The Caged I Know” before I ever saw the movie: “I once read that names which begin with the letter ‘S’ are the names of snakes!” Look at these faces!
Suzy’s palpable relief during her happily ever after moment at the end of the film is pretty great, too:
I’m no connoisseur of horror films, but the opening murder surely has to be one of the most aesthetically striking ones in movie history:
And I love the way Helena Markos’s invisibility is rendered near the end of the film:
But I think the very best SCENE of all is the one which ends in poor Sara’s demise. She’s the figure in the shot bathed in green light above, and the man in yellow in the screengrab above it is the person who will eventually killer her. She attempts to take shelter in a locked room:
But the straight razor worrying the latch on the door suggests that this isn’t a viable long-term solution:
Suddenly she looks up:
The camera follows her gaze to salvation in the form of cheery yellow light streaming through a window:
She climbs up to and out of it:
And into this room:
The decor maybe should have cued Sara into the fact that all is not well, but she is understandably focused on the doorway in front of her which appears to lead to freedom and safety:
She leaps! But it, uh, doesn’t end well:
Many of the colors in Suspiria seem to exist only for us, the audience: I doubt that the idea at the beginning of this sequence is that Sara sees herself as being surrounded by green light, for instance. But this yellow window lures her to her doom! In that respect it is not at all like the Yellow Cocktail, which rewards one with bracing minerality, a pleasing sweet-tart balance, and warm spices. Unless you drink too many of them, I suppose, which might make your head feel like this:
Cheers!
All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 