Mother of Sighs

In discussing the impetus for the 2018 "reimagining" of Suspiria, screenwriter David Kajganich hardly conceals his disdain for Dario Argento's 1977 original. Admitting he's not as enamored with that film as Luca Guadagnino, the director of the new version, Kajganich reveals that he wasn't sold on revisiting Suspiria until Guadagnino suggested a political undercurrent, digging into the setting of 1977 West Berlin, a city plagued by anarchist terrorism and the bloodstained ghosts of the past. ​"Suddenly, it seemed like the scope of it could be quite a bit more, dramatically, instead of the sort of hermetically sealed kind of fever dream of the original," Kajganich said. "We can really have a much grander scale, in terms of understanding the politics of the day.”

What Kajganich's words imply is a rift between two different ways of looking at cinema: one that prizes theme and sociopolitical allegory as markers of significance, and one that sees the true essence of cinema as lying within its unspeakable aspects--the way dust glitters in a beam of light, the weirdness of seeing post-dubbed dialogue stray from the performers' lips, a baffling jump cut that thrusts us into a German beer hall with the abruptness only cinema can accomplish, lapses in logic and bizarre human behavior that approximate the flow of a dream. It's hard to describe what's so pleasurable about these oddities in Argento's original, but they're crucial in understanding why I would rather rewatch that film for about the twentieth time than see Guadagnino and Kajganich's remake for a second or third: the new film's understanding of what makes movies powerful is severely myopic. Yes, objectively speaking, the 2018 Suspiria is smarter and denser and more ambitious than Argento's, but it's also frequently dull and misguided. I can't think of another film as admirably original and committed that I wound up liking so little. 

First, Argento: fresh off the international success of Deep Red (1975), the master of giallo set out to release another sensory onslaught, courtesy of eye-popping, candy-colored gore and a relentless soundtrack by Goblin. Giallo as a subgenre is not known for its thematic complexity or its sensitive depiction of well-rounded characters, specifically women; it is almost entirely devoted to aesthetic extravagance, to visual composition and the crafting of a meticulous soundtrack. As such, it's pure cinema—a description that probably rubs some cinephiles the wrong way, so divorced is it from notions of narrative cohesion or well-rounded character or thematic complexity. 

The quality levels of various giallo films (and directors) fluctuate wildly; some of them, including some by Argento, are awful. (And some by Mario Bava, including Kill, Baby, Kill! and Black Sabbath, are more dreamy and majestic than anything Argento made.) But at their best, giallo movies are transcendently cinematic objects that shrug off comforting accessories like story, character, and theme for a reason: they get in the way of the style. We've heard the criticisms before; they're all style and no substance, they allow male directors to indulge their voyeurism and sadism, they're empty and juvenile. Similar things can be said of dreams: they're the playgrounds in which our unabashed Id runs wild, in which forces of lust and destruction and other repressed drives reign free. Argento said many questionable things in interviews throughout his career, but he had a point when he said this: "Many, many critics say to me that my films are not good because they are too unbelievable, but this is my style. I tell stories like they are dreams. This is my imagination." 

In the case of Suspiria, a seemingly uncountable array of inconsistencies, mistakes, absurdities, and horrific images conspire to create one of the most dreamlike movies ever made. The booming, shrieking score by Goblin commences immediately; a dry voiceover during the opening credits needlessly tells us that American ballet student Susie Bannion (the doe-eyed Jessica Harper, hypnotic) is on her way to a prestigious dance academy in Vienna, a wholly pointless narration since this will soon become obvious. The colors are ravishing: Suspiria has maybe the deepest reds and lushest blues you will ever see onscreen. The indulgent gore is also present almost from the get-go, as we witness another of the school's ballerinas pulled through a glass window, repeatedly stabbed in the heart in immense close-up, strung up by the neck and hurled through the art-deco ceiling. Shards of glass rain from the sky and impale the student's friend, who has offered her refuge for the night. Brutality is fetishized, and if the violence seems offhanded and cruel, it's also so removed from our human plane of existence that the blood, innards, and gashes we see onscreen amount to artistic objects that might as well be framed on the walls of a museum.  

It soon becomes​ clear that the dance academy is a witches' coven, the lair of the ancient and evil Mother Suspirium and the sinister Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett, one of Fritz Lang's favorite actresses; see Secret Beyond the Door [1947] for a similarly oneiric thriller). The question of why the dancers wouldn't just get the hell out as soon as possible is one of the movie's least befuddling mysteries. For example, why do the dancers—all apparently in their late teens or early twenties—behave like petulant schoolchildren? (Supposedly, Argento originally wanted the cast to be filled with pre-teen girls; perhaps it's best in this case that the producers had their way.) Why do two of them decide to have a covert conversation in the middle of the academy's lavish swimming pool? Why is there a shadowy closet filled with razor wire? More importantly, who cares? Viewers who spend their time focusing on these illogicalities are enslaved by the tyrannical strictures of narrative, but there are many cinematic pleasures to be had beyond the confines of a linear, sensible story.

Presumably these are the "weaknesses" that led Kajganich to disparage Argento's film, and while Guadagnino's attitude towards the original seems a little more ambivalent, there's no doubt his intention in tackling the project in the first place was to make something more serious, more profound, more political. To state the obvious upfront: the intention to make a radically different film, not so much a remake as a "reimagining," is commendable, and I do prefer the 2018 Suspiria to what a slavish imitation of Argento might have been. I realize it's unfair in many ways to compare the two movies, which are so radically different; in fact, I wish Guadagnino and Kajganich had just decided to make their own wholly insular film, which might have led to a freer work, less constrained by expectations (both the audience's and the filmmakers' own).   

But the connections between the two Suspirias are there—in the legacy of the original and its long-gestating follow-up, in their broad plot outlines and their divergent attitudes towards what constitutes a good movie—and so the comparisons are unavoidable. The 150-minute remake begins with a long prologue in which one of the dance academy's students flees to her male psychiatrist, Dr. Josef Klemperer, played by Tilda Swinton in heavy makeup. The student, Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz), raves wildly about sinister forces in Madame Blanc's famous dance academy; Madame Blanc is also played by Swinton with her trademark icy glamour. Of course, we know Patricia is telling the truth and that her ranting about the "Three Mothers" portends horrible things for the poor dancers who are subjecting their bodies and minds to relentless abuse for the sake of their art. 

Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) will arrive at Madame Blanc's academy before long, though her fate is considerably more bizarre and mythical than that met by young Susie in Argento's film. In the background of West Berlin circa 1977, political terrorism rages, with mentions of the RAF, PLAF and airplane hijackings conspicuous on radios and televisions. This political furor (which isn't really elucidated in the film; it's not made clear that much of this anarchism was a response to what was perceived as a resurgence of neo-Nazi conservatism in Germany) is meant to parallel the violence (literal and figurative) undergone by the female dancers at the academy. The fabled Three Mothers—Suspirium, Lachrymarum, and Tenebrarum, legendary witches that wield unimaginable power—are disturbingly mirrored by Susie's own mother back in rural Ohio, bedridden and in the throes of dementia, their traumatic relationship conveyed to us in modernist snippets reminiscent of the opening of Persona (or at least that's what Guadagnino is going for). Finally, the character of Josef Klemperer unleashes the skeletons of the Holocaust from Germany's closet, interjecting a story of genocide, loss, and fraught reunion that represents the state-sanctioned violence of which national governments are capable.

Does it sound like there's a lot going on here? Apparently when Kajganich suggested that "there could be quite a bit more, dramatically" in the remake, he meant it literally. Vox's Aja Romano lays out the thematic scope of Suspiria cogently and powerfully, summing it all up when she writes that the film's violence is "a catalyst for positive change, a way for the oppressed — in this case, a new generation of women overthrowing the matriarchy — to rise up and institute newer, better, progressive institutions." Sure, this has nothing to do with Josef Klemperer's story, and only tangentially with the political terrorism Berlin was then dealing with, but the new Suspiria seems to consider political allegory as an end unto itself, regardless of whether it coheres or connects to the rest of the film conceptually. In many ways, the new Suspiria is as messy and illogical as the original, though the fissures this time are of a thematic instead of a narrative nature. 

The problem is that Aja Romano's article is much more interesting to read than the movie is to watch. Through a somber, deadening preponderance of plot, the movie takes up a litany of hot button issues (albeit in gruesomely symbolic fashion) and questions the nature of human vs. political violence. That could have been a fascinating theme, and it's frustrating that the movie doesn't amount to more because Guadagnino and Kajganich's previous collaboration, A Bigger Splash (2015), was weird and loose where Suspiria is oppressive and lifelessly rigid.     

So where does the 2018 Suspiria go wrong? It's in baffling decisions that are meant to be wildly unpredictable but work against the movie's ambitions: not only Tilda Swinton's casting in triple roles (she's arresting as always, but not any more so than if other actors had been cast in those roles, specifically Dr. Klemperer's), but also the semi-comedic appearance of an instructor at the dance academy who horrifically kills herself, unable to deal with the guilt. It's in the split-second images of insects and decaying flesh and sexual symbolism that arrive during Susie's dream sequences, which are meant to be troubling and indicative of some kind of repressed trauma but are really just halfhearted attempts at mysterious provocation. It's in the drab and muddy aesthetic, with a color palette consisting mostly of browns, grays, and blacks; I appreciate that the film's visual style doesn't attempt to imitate the original's, but that doesn't mean it needs to be aggressively ugly. It's in overwrought attempts at stylistic flair such as onscreen titles demarcating seven different "acts," the last of which is a bewildering climax that should be overwhelmingly nuts, though it's ruined by disastrous decisions such as overloaded CGI, blurry cinematography with a slow frame rate that obscures what is meant to be a mindblowing ending, and tender vocals from Thom Yorke that may have a thematic point but undermine whatever aesthetic spell this scene was supposed to cast. 

Most of all, though, it's in the film's simplistic belief that for a movie to be worthwhile and substantial, it needs to tackle every political theme in sight and allegorize every sight and sound until it's drained of cinematic life. In France as early as the 1910s, there was a tug-of-war between two schools of cinematic thought: one championed photogénie, that ineffable cinematic moment enlivened by a stray beam of light, an actor's momentary glance, a euphoric camera movement, any visual spark that captured the indescribable essence of cinema; the other lionized films d'art, "respectable" adaptations of literary works or biblical stories that told linear stories with identifiable characters and easily digestible themes. This tension has existed throughout the history of film in different ways; more recently, I'm reminded of the Pauline Kael quote: ''Movies took their impetus not from the desiccated, imitation European high culture, but from the peep show, the Wild West show, the music hall, the comic strip--from what was coarse and common.''

That's what frustrates me about the Suspiria "reimagining": for as weird and violent and over-the-top as it strives to be, it also wants to remain in the camp of European high culture, it wants to be respectable by dedicating itself to political commentary and thematic scope (even if that scope is so far-flung that it winds up being pretty thin in the process). Argento himself alluded to this duality when he dismissed the 2018 Suspiria as unexciting: "there is no fear, there is no music." Messy and ambitious in theory but drab and uninvolving in practice, the 2018 Suspiria tries to have it both ways instead of knowing and embracing what it truly is. Dario Argento's Suspiria may be silly and incoherent, but it contains more magic in a single shot of blinding light bouncing off the blade of a knife than the new version contains in its entire two-and-a-half hours.