The
ongoing studious efforts of Arrow Video to renew international interest in the
Italian giallo thriller subgenre remain unparalleled in their comprehensiveness
and speed with which they’re being released from obscurity. With much of giallo maestros such as Dario
Argento, Lucio Fulci and Sergio Martino back catalogs being restored to their
respective original glories, it was only a matter of time before Arrow would
turn their attention to some of the far more clandestine offerings of the
subgenre.
Enter
Flavio Mogherini, an Italian director prominently known for screwball sex
comedies such as To Love Ophelia, Lunatics and Lovers and I Camionisti. Despite only having eight feature films to
his name, Mogherini did make room in between the sex comedies for a brief and
most unusual stab at giallo with the surprising, confounding and still
disturbing The Pyjama Girl Case. Loosely based on the true crime story about
British woman Linda Agostini whose body was discovered in Melbourne, Australia
in 1934 with her only identifying trait being her yellow silk pajamas, The Pyjama Girl Case recounts most of the
specific details of the crime scene investigation process while updating the
timeframe to the 1970s.
Carrying
the investigation and much of the first half of the film is retired inspector
Timpson (Ray Milland) in a solid central performance as a cop who has been
around the block far too many times to be satisfied with the official police
statements regarding the case. In
conjunction with the detective story set within the giallo framework is an
almost completely separate thread involving a young woman named Linda (Dalia Di
Lazzaro from Argento’s Phenomena) who
is caught between the affections of three different lovers ala Far from the Madding Crowd. As the film progresses, however, the two
disparate storylines will invariably cross paths as more sordid and gory
details regarding the case come to light and the reins of Linda’s romantic
balancing act begin to slip through her fingers.
As
a giallo, The Pyjama Girl Case much
like The Bloodstained Butterfly doesn’t
follow the normal conventions set forth in a standard giallo film
entirely. In addition to being an atonal
crime scene investigation story, the film has a seemingly disparate character
study playing alongside the main narrative like two films combined as one
before gradually converging. Moreover,
while drawing heavily from the facts of the real 1934 case such as the public
exhibition of the corpse in an effort to try and identify the victim, The Pyjama Girl Case is mostly
interested in figuring out what makes Linda tick and why she seems to swim
deeper and deeper into debauchery.
Equally confounding is the film’s soundtrack by the great Riz Ortolani
intercut with recurring Euro-pop tracks performed by Amanda Lear, giving
viewers a most unexpected listening experience with music that intentionally
doesn’t fit the imagery playing before us.
Having heard Ortolani’s legendary scores for Cannibal Holocaust and Don’t
Torture a Duckling, I was taken aback by just how incongruent this
particular Ortolani offering sounded.
Longtime
fans of the seemingly endless giallo subgenre will find much to enjoy here in
this peculiar true crime story/romantic drama of sorts while newcomers are
likely to be more than a little perplexed if not disappointed by The Pyjama Girl Case. Where prior giallo offerings emerged from
directors with a track record of experience within the genre, Flavio Mogherini’s
stab at giallo feels genuinely strange. It
contains moments that couldn’t help but lift me out of the film such as a brief
scene where our lovely Linda casually washes her feet in a toilet bowl. There’s also something of a Psycho detour mid-picture that’s sure to
throw viewers already grasping at straws completely off the rails. That said, I did enjoy the film for taking
the giallo subgenre as far out of the familiar comfort zones viewers became
accustomed to as humanly possible, leaving you with a dramatic thriller which
achieves that rare feat of being uncategorizable.