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L'occhio dietro la parete
Giuliano Petrelli has been an actor and author and director of only one
film. This one. Then I don't know what happened, but it doesn't matter,
if I had been him, if I could, I would have tried to sit behind the
camera again.
Because if you take away all the defects, the naiveties, the
absurdities from this 1977 film, you can see something positive. Of
course, the things that don't work are many, and they hit the whole
film hard but there are some flashes of genius.
Starting, indeed ending, with the final twist, which, however tight and fast, gives meaning to everything.
Another thing that raises the level and makes us forget some mistakes
is the sound commentary by Pippo Caruso, very worthy even for those
directors who evidently Petrelli draws inspiration, namely the various
D'Argento, Bava and Martino.
Petrelli, however, tries to do things with style, from elegant settings
(basically two apartments) and to shock the viewer by giving him scenes
of violence, sex scenes, naked women and men shot without hesitation.
And above all he tries to reveal a very heavy morbidity that involves
all the protagonists.
After an intriguing start, this too must be recognized, he gets lost in
a labyrinth of ideas, of intellectual ambitions that make the story
rather static and that lead him not to develop things and characters.
For example, like the disturbing butler in love with the mistress of
whom he has a sexy photomontage in his room and who has some affair
with a girl, played by Monica Zanchi, uncredited.
The pearls of wisdom of the third protagonist, the man who makes
history explode, seem more like little thoughts than those who try but
can't, what else.
A wealthy writer, played by Fernando Rey, an acclaimed Spanish actor
with great experience in these roles, confined to a wheelchair due to
an accident in which lost his life, his son, tries to get inspiration
for his work by spying on people. More precisely, by spying on the
tenants of an apartment owned by him that, he rents, through a
sophisticated device.
The sinister domestic Ottavio (José Quaglio) convinces the man
to rent a particular and above all mysterious guy to a certain Arturo
(John Phillip Law). These oddities about him push the writer to try to
deepen the life of the tenant. And to do so he asks Olga (Olga Bisera),
the woman he lives with, to approach him.
This naturally reveals all the morbidity of Arturo but also that of the writer and all the people who live near him.
An interesting story, for a film that was not completely successful but not even a failure.