The Stendhal Syndrome
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Short description
Anna Manni is a police detective in Rome pursuing a serial rapist and killer. The trail leads her to Florence and the Uffizi Gallery, where she is overwhelmed by a hallucinatory episode of the so-called Stendhal syndrome, in which great works of art produce a loss of the boundary between the painting and reality. The man she is hunting abducts and assaults her, and although she eventually breaks free of him, his body disappears into a river. Murders continue afterwards, and Anna, her mind coming apart, comes to believe her persecutor is still alive and following her.
Dario Argento directed and co-wrote the film with Franco Ferrini, and he produced it with Giuseppe Colombo for Medusa Film and Cine 2000. It is the twelfth of the seventeen features he has directed in chronological order, arriving after Trauma and before The Phantom of the Opera. Asia Argento, the director's daughter, plays Anna, with Thomas Kretschmann as Alfredo Grossi, Marco Leonardi, Luigi Diberti, Paolo Bonacelli and Lucia Stara in supporting roles. Made for about four million dollars, it runs 119 minutes.
On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6 out of 10 from roughly 9,900 votes, and on TMDB 5.4 out of 10 from about 300 votes, while a critics' rating stands at 5.7 out of 10 from ten reviews. Audience and critical responses therefore sit close together, neither enthusiastic nor dismissive, with the IMDb sample considerably larger than the other two.
What's left behind the scenes
- Stendhal syndrome is a specific psychological peculiarity in which a person experiences art with intense emotion, as if being transported into the reality depicted on the canvas. The boundary between reality and fantasy blurs for these people.
- The underwater filming of Anna after she fainted did not take place in a swimming pool, but in the sea. The giant grouper she kisses was actually a radio-controlled model towed on ropes attached to a motorboat. Literally a couple of minutes after filming wrapped, the model broke down.
- Director Dario Argento admitted that he himself experienced Stendhal syndrome as a child (a specific psychological peculiarity in which a person experiences art with intense emotion, as if being transported into the reality depicted on the canvas). Once, during a trip to Athens with his parents, he was climbing the steps of the Parthenon when he had an attack, fell into a trance, got lost, and was not found for several hours. This made such an impression on him that Argento never forgot about the incident, and when he came across a book by Graciela Magherini, he immediately thought of it and made a film on the subject.
- To decorate Alfredo's underground dwelling, graffiti artists were hired, and in just one night they covered about 10 square meters of walls with drawings.
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