The movie feels like it was made before its time. A contemplative, artsy, indecently long, paradoxical gothic meta-horror that reflects on the genre and its interaction with other genres. Because you might think: okay, black horses? Check. A decrepit church full of morbid symbolism? Check. A creepy village? Check. Ghosts of wolves? Check. A pale and bleeding handmaid? Check. A Romantic protagonist, ready for anything, going through inhumane suffering? Check. An offbeat womanchild of a heroine? (Should France have its own Fair Folk, I bet she, just like Machen's little girl, would've been obsessed with them, and just like her, Catherine would've died at the end because of them.) Check. Youth, saving itself from the religious zealotry? Check! (This was the first reason why I remembered Victor Hugo here, and the second is the movie being very reserved with colours. I know it's for the historical gloomy atmosphere, but I remembered that he loved to draw Romantic landscapes with charcoal and paint them with coffee, and they, too, have all shades of sepia in them.) But what you've eventually watched is much more like a story about a historical time period and the ethics of medicine. At some point, you might probably think that it could've easily been an indie horror from one of the newer decades - long and socially relevant, only Giorgino is by far not as humble with a budget and thus, probably, feels somewhat dissonant. It's almost as if this film, juggling Gothic tropes and showing them off one after another like songs performed at a concert (no wonder it's a film from three prominent musical figures), didn't wait for the theoreticians to become obsessed with all kinds of horror just a bit and appeared decades before the term "elevated horror" was even coined.
Funnily, nowadays its main subjects, such as femininity, mental health or a glum folk revision of religion, are the core pillars of almost any prominent horror title (just as the very method of filming a horror movie the way it basically becomes a social story with esoteric decorations). The movie is actually quite successful at binding all of its topics together and rhyming them with each other. You'd guess this is how an isolated village of First World War Europe would look and feel, with women taking control and justice into their own hands, putting away the traditional, subdued role both in the plot and the narrative. It's almost always the guys who are shown vulnerable, sick, and weakened; it's an old crippled priest who becomes the young doctor's connoisseur and someone to share candies with, that the dead children didn't get, it's the master of the old manor who loses his mind and barely comprehends what is happening around him.
The men's wing of the madhouse is probably the scariest part of this supposedly supernatural Gothic movie, not least due to the absurd, tragicomical chaos of war. In fact, even before Giorgino, Boris Vian and The King in Yellow made me think it's something about the French culture to find social collapse simultaneously horrendous and hilarious. Even the main story sometimes looks quite ridiculous - the riot of a disturbed girl and a retired soldier on his last legs against the tired women, embittered by winter and anxious loneliness. It is still tragic all right, though, and the global nature of the movie makes this tragedy of a girl unfit for these tough times even more touching. In fact, her fate echoes for me the novel "The Fiery Angel" written by Russian author Valeriy Bryusov shortly before the Russian Revolution. It is about a young woman in a wrong time period (whose name, surprisingly, isn't Tristana but instead just Renata) whose madness brings her into the dungeons of a German Inquisition of the XVI century and... and I won't tell you whether her beloved soldier comes in time to rescue her or not. This question is answered in the book.
Like Mylène's heroine here, Renata was a special, rare, Ophelia the maneater. Even drowning in scraps of lyrics, she drove men crazy, and there was little good waiting for all of them. Although, despite starting Giorgino mainly because of her, here, unlike in Ghostland, I didn't only feel invested when she was on screen, and that's another good sign. Funnily, it's Ghostland, a trans-insensitive exploit horror, that looks much older than its time although it plays with the tropes of horror just as consciously and no less enthusiastically than Giorgino, and is equally hard to criticise and evaluate properly - because what can you do with a chameleon movie changing its genre on the way, right?
Funnily, nowadays its main subjects, such as femininity, mental health or a glum folk revision of religion, are the core pillars of almost any prominent horror title (just as the very method of filming a horror movie the way it basically becomes a social story with esoteric decorations). The movie is actually quite successful at binding all of its topics together and rhyming them with each other. You'd guess this is how an isolated village of First World War Europe would look and feel, with women taking control and justice into their own hands, putting away the traditional, subdued role both in the plot and the narrative. It's almost always the guys who are shown vulnerable, sick, and weakened; it's an old crippled priest who becomes the young doctor's connoisseur and someone to share candies with, that the dead children didn't get, it's the master of the old manor who loses his mind and barely comprehends what is happening around him.
The men's wing of the madhouse is probably the scariest part of this supposedly supernatural Gothic movie, not least due to the absurd, tragicomical chaos of war. In fact, even before Giorgino, Boris Vian and The King in Yellow made me think it's something about the French culture to find social collapse simultaneously horrendous and hilarious. Even the main story sometimes looks quite ridiculous - the riot of a disturbed girl and a retired soldier on his last legs against the tired women, embittered by winter and anxious loneliness. It is still tragic all right, though, and the global nature of the movie makes this tragedy of a girl unfit for these tough times even more touching. In fact, her fate echoes for me the novel "The Fiery Angel" written by Russian author Valeriy Bryusov shortly before the Russian Revolution. It is about a young woman in a wrong time period (whose name, surprisingly, isn't Tristana but instead just Renata) whose madness brings her into the dungeons of a German Inquisition of the XVI century and... and I won't tell you whether her beloved soldier comes in time to rescue her or not. This question is answered in the book.
Like Mylène's heroine here, Renata was a special, rare, Ophelia the maneater. Even drowning in scraps of lyrics, she drove men crazy, and there was little good waiting for all of them. Although, despite starting Giorgino mainly because of her, here, unlike in Ghostland, I didn't only feel invested when she was on screen, and that's another good sign. Funnily, it's Ghostland, a trans-insensitive exploit horror, that looks much older than its time although it plays with the tropes of horror just as consciously and no less enthusiastically than Giorgino, and is equally hard to criticise and evaluate properly - because what can you do with a chameleon movie changing its genre on the way, right?