The most obvious reference point for Tinto Brass’ Deadly
Sweet (or I Am What I Am) is Antonioni’s Blow-Up, made a year
earlier (the poster is visible in one scene) – it’s another
mysterious odyssey through “swinging London,” prominently featuring another fashion
photographer, and with a heavy emphasis on style. Brass might be able to match
Antonioni for incidental documentary interest – there’s a sense that he or his
cohorts went out and amassed a large stockpile of random documentary footage
(people reacting in the street or on public transport, old women looking out of
windows and so forth) and then cut it in here and there to evoke incident and authenticity.
Otherwise though, this is a scattershot exercise by comparison, replacing
Antonioni’s spatial precision with a rapacious appetite for stimulation and
diversion – the film alternates between black and white, breaks into split screens,
flashes compulsively on items such as Underground signs or light bulbs, and drenches
almost every available wall in movie posters or pop art prints; the staging of
chases and fights and other action is notably imprecise and unconvincing. But
the greatest lag on the movie is the plot – a wan and unproductively confusing
affair that kicks off when Bernard (Jean-Louis Trintignant) discovers a
nightclub owner murdered in his office, along with Jane (Ewa Aulin) who claims
she doesn’t do it: pursued by various heavies, the two take off to solve the
mystery, while occasionally pausing to indulge their erotic attraction. But the
two never register as more than stock figures in a dubbed landscape, the Godardian
device of having Trintignant spout quotes from the likes of Mao or (yes)
Antonioni counting for absolutely nothing. Still, it has a kind of “let’s make
a movie” glee that you seldom see now – a sense of the city and the culture
as resources to be pilfered as one chooses, of a joy in movement and titillation and
connection.
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