Swanvale Halt Film Club: Footprints on the Moon/Le Orme (1975)

It took me a while to discover how I had found out about Footprints on the Moon, a reasonably obscure little Italian thriller sometimes known by its other title, Le Orme. By a process of elimination I worked out it was in Jonathan Rigby's history of Continental horror film, Euro Gothic - not that there is much horrific about the movie, and it's far more psychologically unsettling and inconclusive than most of the other films that tome features. Its Brazilian star, Florinda Bolkan, was apparently so affected by the filming that the weight fell off her, and there are places where she indeed looks worryingly skinny, appropriately for a character undergoing such emotional derangement. It's slow, episodic, and beautifully filmed, the old bits of Istanbul (apparently) and its environs standing in for the fictional island of Garma which Alice, a Portuguese translator working in Italy, is convinced she has never visited and yet where everyone recognises her. The version I saw (via Cinema Paradiso) is distributed by Shameless Films who seem to specialise in mid-1970s horror (I think I will avoid most of the rest of their output including the notorious Flavia the Heretic in which Bolkan also stars). Perhaps that's why the lipsynching seems to be ever-so-slightly awry: at first I switched to watching in Italian with English subtitles until I realised the actors were, in fact, speaking English. There are a couple of short scenes which apparently only exist in a dubbed Italian tape, and which, having been copied back in, appear grainier than the rest of the film. If anything that only adds to the weirdness.