A Film a Week - The Body / Il corpo

 previously published on Cineuropa

Back in 2017, Álex de la Iglesia helmed a remake of Paolo Genovese’s Perfect Strangers (2016). Now, Italian cinema is “returning the favour” to Spain with Vincenzo Alfieri’s remake of Oriol Paulo’s The Body (2012). The thing that both pairs of films have in common is that they are not the only iterations of the material: for Genovese’s film, there are 20 or so remade versions, while for Paulo’s, Alfieri’s is the fourth remake. Anyhow, the latest version of The Body has premiered in Tallinn Black Nights’ Critics’ Picks Competition, while its next festival screening is scheduled for Torino.

The basic plot is the same in all versions: the body of a wealthy and powerful businesswoman who apparently died of a heart attack disappeared from the morgue just before the scheduled autopsy. The relentless and slightly blunt inspector sees the woman’s husband, who married into her family money, as the prime suspect, while the man will do everything to try to convince him that he is innocent, even if it means admitting his infidelity and implicating his younger lover whom he tried to protect. However, Alfieri’s version has enough of its own twists, spices and flavours to make it appear original and interesting enough.

On the plot level, probably the most interesting intervention is that the potential victim, Rebecca Zuin (Claudia Gerini), is now presented as an abusive woman on a power trip with a penchant for playing cruel practical jokes at her husband Bruno’s (Andrea Di Luigi) expense. The other major one is that lead inspector Cosser’s (Giuseppe Battiston) anger-management issues are more apparent than they are in the other versions, which leads to a stronger implication that he is out to get Bruno. This could have resulted in Battiston’s complete acting domination over Di Luigi, but in the latter’s interpretation, Bruno is more blasé than he is weak. Also, the relationships between the leading characters and the supporting ones seem to have been deepened, which highlights the melodramatic component of the film.

On the executional level, however, The Body is quite impressive in many aspects. The melodrama, cranked up to the level of a soap opera with all its twists and turns, paves the way for Claudia Gerini to shine as Rebecca, even though her character appears only in flashbacks. Speaking of which, Alfieri manages to refute the thesis that using flashbacks to tell lies makes no sense, arguing that the truth is just a matter of the characters’ perspective. But maybe Alfieri’s greatest accomplishment is that he has managed to resist the urge to turn The Body completely into a neo-giallo, although he did have all of the prerequisites for it in the source material. He keeps the giallo elements to the camera and lighting departments (kudos to cinematographer Andrea Reitano for capturing the interior of the morgue as a play between light and shadows), and also to the music (scored by Francesco Cerasi), which is conveniently synth-heavy and pulsating.

However, this filmmaker, who finds himself at home within the boundaries of the crime and thriller genres, opts for other influences here. They can be predominantly found in the US cinema of the late 1990s and early 2000s, especially in the erotic-thriller department. Alfieri’s The Body is sufficiently steamy and sleazy to make it work perfectly for broad audiences. In that regard, it is definitely a movie that will fit in at repertory theatres far better than it will with the arthouse-dominated festival circuit.