Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Reflet dans un diamant mort

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzan's mind-bending, spy-vs-spy, Euro sci-fi action thriller is a movie that clearly loves movies, or at least the surface pleasures of movies. Reflection in a Dead Diamond is comprised of images rather than ideas. It's a cheeky send-up of spy movie conventions, but whatever satirical elements it has feel very secondary to a desire to play with all the fun stuff in spy movies without having to write a script. Not that there's no story to this movie. There kinda is.

Fabio Testi plays John Diman, a 70-year-old ex-spy whose a cross between late-career Marcello Mastroianni and the "The Most Interesting Man in the World" from those Dos Equis commercials. At least that's what he seems like when we first see him living in a luxury hotel on the French Riviera. When the mysterious woman in the room next door disappears, it sends him, or maybe us, into his memories, where we see him as his younger self. Yannick Renier plays Diman's younger self, a slick, sexy, 007-type agent. Or maybe he's a comic book character chasing a shapeshifting female assassin. Or maybe both are just actors playing roles in a film. This is the kind of movie that doesn't care how you interpret it; it just wants you to think it's cool. Thi Mai Nguyen plays the female assassin, Serpentik. She sure looks cool, and there's a lot we could read into her characterization as an anti-Bond Girl, or perhaps the vengeful collective spirit of every actress who has had to play a Bond Girl.

The directors have come up with some amazing transitions from shot to shot, scene to scene, reference point ot refrecne point, but what purpose do these shots and edits serve? Cool transitions felt inventive back in the heyday of MTV and creative British advertising. Sexy images and flashy editing for the sake of sexy images and flashy editing work much better in the three-minute music video or the 30-second commercial formats. A feature film needs more to sustain our interest throughout its running time.

Of course, there are some movies of this sort that I enjoy, but few have scenes where the actors (or characters) are seen behind the scenes of the movie they're making. How Meta! This type of forthwall breaking felt radical fifty years ago; now it just feels like something from the bottom of the old bag of tricks. Once we got to the leads in between takes, I was ready to leave.

This is one of those movies I imagine real-life villains having on a loop, playing on giant TVs as wallpaper in their palatial homes to make them seem hip. But to sit and watch? The zippy, high-energy, visually stimulating 87 minutes just crawl by. Still, I would have given these directors an extra half-star for their cleverness had I not watched Bi Gan's latest film, Resurrection, the next night. Seeing another unconventional narrative about movies, memories, and genre tropes that completely captivated me for 2 hours and 40 minutes made me all the more resentful of this dead diamond upon reflection.