James Bond-like Genre Pastiche is the Rarest of Gems

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“It is false to say that the screen is incapable of putting us ‘in the presence of’ the actor,” the great French philosopher André Bazin wrote in 1967. “It does so in the same way as a mirror — one must agree that the mirror relays the presence of the person reflected in it – but it is a mirror with a delayed reflection, the tin foil of which retains the image.”

Bazin was concerned about the crucial differences between theater and film and between fiction and reality, and so it seems, are the Belgian filmmakers Bruno Forzani & Hélène Cattet. With Reflection in a Dead Diamond, which continues their experimentation in genre pastiche, the two examine, in a hyper-focused, often surrealist manner, the ever-expanding zeitgeist of the James Bond franchise. Through John Diman (Yannick Renier and Fabio Testi, old and young, respectively), Forzani & Cattet puts us “in the presence of the actor,” who in turn, perhaps through dementia, perhaps through endless bloody battle for state intelligence, cannot discern between himself, the actor playing him, the books based on his life (or is it the books based on the character he plays) or the genuine article – whatever that may be. Whatever mirror we are starting at, in Bazin-like terms, is refracted so many times and in such a visually resplendent way that it all gets mixed up into a beautiful, confounding kaleidoscope.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond Is Your Favorite Bond Film as Relayed By Someone with Bizarre, Fading Memory

Whatever the case, the film is easily Forzani & Cattet’s most startling achievement. A continuously shifting rubix cube which changes shape the second you think you’ve figured it out, Reflections in a Dead Diamond is simultaneously the duo’s most easily-accessible narrative and its most academic. When we meet Diman (Testi), whose name is curiously close to both the French and English word for “diamond,” he is luxuriating at a hotel on the Côte d’Azur, eating urchins and leering at bikini-clad women on the beach. His neighbor at the resort has been complaining about noise, and, in an attempt to spy on her, Diman utilizes an old gadget: a ring with an eye on it that allows the user to see through surfaces — but which can blind you with over-use.

The neighbor disappears shortly thereafter, and Diman is thrust into a vortex of memories of himself as a younger agent (Renier) on a curious mission that would not seem out of place in the Roger Moore era of Ian Fleming’s franchise. In spectacularly inventive fashion, Forzani & Cattet examine a spy’s life in reverse. Instead of sitting alongside our suave agent as he fights the good fight, we receive it through a warped brain’s memory: all the lurid details and whatever moral judgement he clearly has about himself.

Diman’s mission — as well Forzani & Cattet’s plot — is incomprehensible by design. Roughly speaking, it seems to have something to do with Diman’s responsibility to safeguard a diamond magnate, Markus Strand (Koen de Bouw), who, in explicitly Bond villain-like ways, is both a self-proclaimed philanthropist and dirty capitalist. His opposition is, also Bond-like, the shape-shifting, sexually promiscuous, blood-lusting, leather-clad martial artist Serpentik (Thi-Mai Nguyen). Meanwhile, Diman’s colleague and sometime-lover (Céline Camara) struts about in a sparkling silver dress whose silver sequins are expendable into slicing weaponry via a covert red button, and has loyalties which are perpetually in question (at least to us).

Like Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what is what, and that puzzle is infinitely enjoyable once you understand that nothing is really supposed to make sense on a traditional level.

The film’s refracting mirror doubles in on itself when the younger Diman is thrust into a red carpet scene where, indeed, “memories and moviemaking” collide. Diman watches the playback of what appears to us to be a film but could be a mission report inside the spy’s operation. Like Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what is what, and that puzzle is infinitely enjoyable once you understand that nothing is really supposed to make sense on a traditional level. Nothing is grounded in reality, and like the genres which Forzani & Cattet ape, the subsequent delirium is part and parcel of the point. No one watches Diamonds are Forever for the plot; you watch for the set-pieces and the gadgets.

To be sure, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is far more violent than the Bond films, but that franchise is only one the many direct and indirect references at play. The palette includes Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, Baroque-era paintings by artists like Caravaggio, Kaneto Shindo’s dream-like 1964 horror Onibaba, the absurdity of the life-like masks from Mission: Impossible, to the explosive comic art of Frank Miller. Forzani & Cattet are in direct conversation with this long lineage of pop art and Eurospy, delighting in the sandbox of these genres while asking us to consider how we consume and find pleasure in the cartoonish violence of the surveillance state.

With its maximalist aesthetic (extreme close-ups of beer pouring, nipple piercings, skin being torn from the flesh), the film is a delayed extension of giallo and fumetti neri, the Italian genre novels and films which imitated American and British mysteries and novels. Here, in the theme park of hedonistic pleasures, the entire world is an illusion, less a mirror to ourselves than an x-ray of our brain in its most imaginative state.