A lizard in a woman´s skin (V.O. Una lucertola con la pelle di donna)
Italy, 1971
Director: Lucio Fulci
Script: Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti, José Luis Martínez Mollá, André Tranché, Ottavio Jemma
Cast: Florinda Bolkan (Carol), Jean Sorel (Frank), Stanley Baker (Inspettore Corvin), Silvia Monti (Deborah), Alberto de Mendoza (Sargento Brandon), Penny Brown (Jenny), Mike Kennedy (Hubert), Ely Galleani (Joan), George Rigaud (Dr. Kerr)
Music: Ennio Morricone
Story
Carol, whose father is an important British politician, is married to Frank, who has a daughter from his first marriage, named Joan. The couple, which is living in London, is not going through its best moment. Carol visits a psychologist, and tells him about a recurring dream that has been troubling her for some time. In that dream, Carol walks inside a train, making her way through naked people. It overwhelms her. Then she ends up in front of a huge bed where she meets another woman, who approaches her sexually. This is her neighbor Julia, an ex-actress who often has wild orgies in her home. The psychologist interprets the dream by suggesting that Carol, who leads an unsatisfactory and gray life, feels in her subconscious the desire for “liberation” that Julia represents, which pushes her towards an internal conflict…
A few nights later, a slight variation in Carol’s dream occurs: This time she kills Julia by stabbing her with a letter opener. In doing so, she wears her fur coat, which she leaves by the bed where the dreamlike murder takes place.
To Carol’s great dismay, a few days later it is discovered that Julia has actually been murdered. She was killed the same night Carol had the dream described above. And if that wasn’t enough, next to the body they find a coat and a letter opener…
Carol updates her husband on her concerns. Her father, the influential politician, is also informed. He believes that someone has schemed to drive his daughter crazy.
Meanwhile, Inspector Corvin is busy investigating the macabre crime. First, a red-haired hippie from the victim’s circle of friends is arrested and confesses to being the murderer. But he turns out to be just a crazy drug addict with a desire to be in the limelight. Or at least that’s what it seems at first, because as we will see, that ginger and a friend of his also appear in Carol’s dream. And both, who live in a hippie commune, are friends of Frank’s daughter Joan.
All indications point to Carol, so she is arrested as the main suspect. But Inspector Corvin is convinced that many things don’t add up, and he continues his investigations…
Commentary
Interesting giallo by Lucio Fulci (co-produced between Italy, Spain and France), with enormous dreamlike and hallucinatory influences.
If Hitchcock and Clouzot are the greatest architects of the psychological thriller, we could say that this little lizard with the skin of a woman is the paradigm of the psychedelic thriller. The nooks and crannies of the subconscious, the internal psychic conflicts, the confusion between reality and fantasy, and some lysergic crimes are the ingredients of this cocktail of detective intrigue seasoned with a touch of eroticism and with huge amounts of LSD.
Florinda Bolkan plays the confused protagonist, who fears she has committed a crime because she dreamt she was doing it while the murder was also taking place in reality. The analogous details between her dream and the scene of the crime contribute to unbalance her already fragile state of mind. Will anyone try to take advantage of that? Will the suspicions of Carol’s father be true, who fears that someone is premeditatingly seeking to drive his daughter insane?
Adding to the convoluted plot is a story of extortion and blackmail, in which the infidelities of Carol’s husband Frank are brought to light. In addition, for her psychoanalysis sessions, Carol used to write down her dreams. Anyone who lived in the house with her could have read the notes and discovered Carol’s recurring dream about the neighbor, using that information for her murderous plans… and to incriminate Carol.
Fulci gives us here a solid, powerful giallo, loaded with visual impact, with psychedelic scenes (to which Maestro Morricone’s “acid jazz” soundtrack also contributes), a handling of the camera that is common in his filmography (abundant sweeps and zooms, for example). The plot is complex and simple at the same time, with the characteristic “whodunit” of the crime stories and with the “red herrings” or false clues, until the moment of the climax and the resolution is reached.
Florinda Bolkan, who gives life to the main character Carol, also plays a key role in another Fulci film, “Don´t torture a duckling”, shot the following year. The Roman director did not yet resort so much to gore, although we do have a few shocking scenes of bloodshed, especially the one where dogs are cut open in the asylum. Because of the truculent and realistic scene, Fulci was denounced by the animal protection society… But the filmmaker was able to prove his innocence, showing that the “dogs” were in reality nothing more than dolls created by the famous Carlo Rambaldi, who later would be in charge of the special effects in Hollywood box-office hits such as “Alien” (Ridley Scott, 1979) and “E.T.” (Steven Spielberg, 1982).
Another of the best scenes is that of the long chase that Carol suffers in a kind of abandoned warehouse, where she will have to deal with (in addition to the individual who tries to kill her) a swarm of angry bats. That scene awoke the admiration of Mario Bava, Italian master of Gothic horror and patriarch of the aesthetics of the giallo.
Fulci had thought of calling the film “The Cage”, but the production company imposed the title of “A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” thus taking advantage of the fashion for gialli titles inaugurated by Dario Argento with his “trilogy of animals”: “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage” (1970), “Cat o’Nine Tails” and “Four Flies on Grey Velvet” (both also from 1971). The name of the film does not refer to the reptilians, but to a hallucinatory-psychotropic vision of one of the hippys, in his statements to the inspector.
Besides the Brazilian Florinda Bolkan, star of numerous Italian films, we have the Swedish Anita Strindberg as Julia (who also developed most of her career in Italy) and the French Jean Sorel as Frank. This actor participated in “Belle de jour” (Luis Buñuel, 1967), and was the protagonist of the excellent “Short night of the glass dolls” (Aldo Lado, 1971). We also find in the cast Silvia Monti as Deborah, Frank’s lover; and George Rigaud as the psychologist Dr. Kerr. The first was seen in the polizziesque “The last desperate hours” (Giorgio Stegani, 1974), and the second appears in the giallo “Death walks on high heels” by Luciano Ercoli, also from 1971 and also set in England. By the way, George Rigaud was Argentinean (real name Jorge Rigato).
In short, “A Lizard with a Woman’s Skin” is a rather underrated film, which deserves further recognition.
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