Deadly Sweet

At his most experimental, and heavily influenced by Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Brass crafts a thriller/noir steeped in the psychedelia of Swinging London, layering the cinematic narrative across multiple registers. After his brilliant debut with the anarchic “Chi lavora è perduto (In capo al mondo)” in 1963, the director moves away from the realist, Nouvelle Vague-inflected documentary style to experiment with a range of cinematic genres and forms, blending pop art, comic strip aesthetics, and photography – not surprisingly, given that in his youth Brass had frequented the Cinémathèque française and made abstract experimental shorts such as Spatiodynamisme (1958). A masterful use of colour alternates with black-and-white sequences and onomatopoeic text that evokes pop culture, while Guido Crepax contributes drawings and graphic works both for the set design and as a kind of visual storyboard for the director.