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The House of Laughing Windows
Aggravating boredom in the comfort of your living room.
1976
Review: September 26, 2006
Director: Pupi Avati
Starring: Lino Capolicchio, Francesca Marciano, Gianni Cavina, Giulio Pizzirani
Maybe until you fall asleep. Then don’t bother watching the rest of the movie once you wake up.
THE SETUP:
Guy goes to remote Italian village to restore painting. Evil ensues.
DISCUSSION:
I watched this one based on the goofiness of the title. Then, when I saw that it was from the 70s and Italian, it was elevated to the top of my list. Now, if this movie were better than it is, I would be lauding the loopy logic of this selection criteria. But since the movie sucks, I have to question it and chastise myself to be more careful in the future.
We begin with this guy screaming [and screaming and screaming] while he hangs, droning on and on [and on, and on] about “my colors will purify me… people will see my colors and they will go into their minds… purity… death…” etc. Then we meet our weird-looking hero Stefano, who is some craftsman brought to town to restore this painting in the local church, and thus make the dead, very rural town into something of a tourist attraction. During all this there is a very lush score while you’re seeing somewhat off-kilter things on screen, which [before I realized that the entire movie is just bullshit] reminded me of the more sentimental moments of David Lynch.
So Stefano sees the painting, which features a guy in the middle being stabbed as he is tied to a stake. It seemed to me not the sort of thing to bank on tourist interest in, but… This painting is by Legnani, the “Painter of Agony” [and here I thought Thomas Kinkade, the “painter of light,” was also the “painter of agony”], who was really into painting people as they died. Are you creeped out yet? We also find out that the church used to be used to store corpses by the SS. But you know, we’re going to find out a lot of things that seem like they should be significant, but ultimately turn out not to mean anything at all.
He then meets this red-headed woman who, we are told, has “fucked every man in town.” Stefano partakes, and you will note that while they’re laying in bed, her red hair exactly matches the bright red of the headboard. Then comes the ONE thing I ended up liking about this film: as they lay in bed, the light from a doorway, cast on the wall, slowly fades to darkness to show the passage of time. It was simple, atmospheric and effective. This woman turns out to mean almost nothing to the story.
Then Stefano meets his friend who has something urgent to tell him about the painting, but never gets around to spilling the beans before he spills his brains, having been pushed out of a window. Then for some reason Stefano has to go live at this creepy farmhouse, which is NOT actually the house of laughing windows, that comes later, but there were so many creepy houses and barns that I just lost track after a while.
Not long after comes a scene where Stefano is looking at other paintings by the supposedly-great Legnani [whose paintings are quite average, by the way], and one of them supposedly uses this guy’s wife as the model, and what we see is a woman’s nude body with a man’s face. And I’m like “All right! Are we going to get some fucked-up, gender-screwing subtext here?” But no, although you can see how I hadn’t gotten completely burnt out on thinking this thing might actually make sense yet. We find out that people in this godforsaken village eat rats. There’s this whole deal with this paralyzed old woman who lives upstairs in the evil house where Stefano lives. He finds an audio tape of the artists doing his whole “purity / death” speech from the beginning. He meets a brunette, Francesca, sleeps with her, and asks her to move in. Francesca keeps a fridge full of snails, by the way. Yeah.
But what of the restoration? Well, it seems that the painting has this baked-on, spattered-on spackling that is supposed to look like decades of neglect and abuse, but actually just looks like meringue, which serves the movie well, as all Stefano has to do is remove the meringue to “restore” the painting. He uncovers two figures at the sides of the main guy, who are supposed to be the painter’s sisters, who apparently provide the painter with victims that somehow allow him to communicate with his dead mother via his painting ritual. Okay, now does any of that make sense? And this is exactly what leads you, as a viewer, to the final revelation that this movie is just throwing everything it can think of at a wall and seeing what sticks. It’s filming everything as though it were “significant” in order to give the audience as many “oooh” moments as it can, although the fact is that you could remove an HOUR from the middle of this and not miss anything. And that’s where my significant fast-forwarding began. The thing is, I can only FF at 2X normal speed, or else I lose the subtitles, and then it’s hard to know when to stop and watch again. And while you’re sitting there, waiting, waiting, waiting for something to develop, you start to get annoyed. I have written in my notes: “SO boring. NOTHING is happening.” This seems to be one of those “movies by the yard.”
It must also be pointed out that women are not exactly treated as the equal partners of men in this movie, called “bitch” and “whore” without a thought, and generally there just to be fucked and whine, which is not even to mention the pointless and protracted rape scene. Thanks, fellas.
Okay, let’s get this shit over with. You know… I was going to lay out the whole ending and tell you the shocking revelations, but if for some unfortunate reason you are plagued with watching this movie, you’re going to need as much interest in it as you can get. Suffice to say I was NOT haunted or shocked by the final truth that is exposed, just irritated.
I was surprised to see that this film is considered a “classic” by about half of the commenters on IMDb, and one note says it is a classic in Italy. There is a documentary on the restoration of the film on the disc, so apparently someone thought it was worth restoring. I tell you this because, what all those people saw in it, I haven’t the slightest clue [of course, the other half hated it]. To me it was just a really lame [not even that many people are killed] horror thing cheaply designed to give you shivers for two hours, regardless of whether those shivers are toward any greater point or purpose. Which makes me, once I realize that, start to resent a film. Just another lesson that you can’t judge a movie based on its title alone. Except in the cases where you can.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
For the serious Giallo enthusiast only.
