What is Footprints on the Moon (aka Footprints aka Le Orme), apart from an Italian movie from 1975? Genre categorisation isn’t easy but how about psychological sci-fi thriller meets love story meets giallo horror meets paranoid modernist dreamscape? Or, from a different direction, it’s DP Vittorio Storaro’s entry in the “world’s best cinematographer” competition.
The visuals are astonishing, glorious, technically insane at times. And they also threaten to bring the film to a complete standstill here and there. But it just doesn’t matter because a) they are so bloody amazing and b) there isn’t very much to bring to a standstill in the first place.
So, yes, there’s not much plot. But what little there is happens right up front – an Italian translator called Alice (Florinda Bolkan) gets upbraided at work for having been absent for two days. She has no idea what her boss is talking about. But, it turns out, two days are in fact missing from her life. And so, troubled by a recurring dream about an astronaut abandoned on the Moon, and prompted by a photograph of a seaside resort, she heads off to the coast to try and solve the mystery of the missing days.
Alice is well named because when she gets to the fabulously grand hotel in the seaside town of Garma, she enters a through-the-looking-glass world of non-sequitur characters, meeting people who claim they have met her before. Some of them insist that Alice’s name is really Nicole.
Wandering between a knowing little girl (giallo fans will recognise Nicoletta Elmi), a grande dame called Raffaella (Lila Kedrova) and a handsome stranger called Henry (Peter McEnery, of Entertaining Mr Sloane fame), Alice searches for answers in this phantasmagoric dreamscape in which the humans seem as detached as the invariably empty streets and deserted beaches of the resort. The only real connective tissue between these places and people is the recurring dream, and, eventually, Harry, who makes a play for Alice, albeit one that’s oblique to the point of being take it or leave it.
Klaus Kinski turns up, dubbed badly into English (though he can speak English very well) as a swivel-eyed scientist at mission control in Alice’s astronaut dreams. The suggestion is there that he might also be driving her psyche.
Spooky is the overall mood, brilliantly so. Detached. Paranoid too. Bolkan is perfectly cast, a long, lean presence in immaculately tailored clothes that are an ironic rebuff to Alice’s mental condition. Imagine David Bowie in his Thin White Duke era – the similarity is pretty close.
Director Luigi Bazzoni draws inspiration from modernist movies of the previous decade. Like Antonioni’s La Notte this is a visually driven film, with strong compositions more important than narrative. Bazzoni may also be influenced by Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, which had come out two years earlier and was also thick with disjointed faces, places and motivations.
The entire film is a dream, possibly, or a wander through Alice’s own troubled mind. Or an alternate-reality take on Alice’s mundane existence. Or even, possibly, a time-travel movie, with Elmi as the younger Alice and Kedrova as an older version. Bring your own interpretation – plenty will fit.
It is almost painfully mannered and would be easy to spoof. But its looks are so exquisite that almost any excess can be forgiven. Watch how often Storaro sets out to film what would be unfilmable by other cinematographers – Alice stepping into and out of deep shadows or walking up to powerful light sources and not disappearing into darkness or blowing out in impossible high contrast. Four years later Storaro would be shooting Apocalypse Now for Francis Ford Coppola. But visually Footprints on the Moon has the edge.
Towards the end – announced by a church organ, appropriately – things shift decisively into giallo territory and Bazzoni appears to announce that he’s finally decided what sort of movie this is. Genre junkies finally get their fix as things appear to be heading thataway. Enjoy it while it lasts, which isn’t long.
Footprints on the Moon – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
