REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND. James Bond We Need

Not long ago, we were still speculating about who would direct the new James Bond film. The list of names was impressive: Alfonso Cuarón, Edward Berger, Christopher Nolan, Edgar Wright. In the end, the job went to Denis Villeneuve – a relatively safe choice, though for more than a few reasons, an exciting one.

Had Amazon’s decision-makers shown a bit more courage and artistic sensitivity, they might have considered one more option: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the French-Belgian duo behind Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

I vividly remember my first encounter (for that’s really the only fitting word) with the expressive, entirely sui generis cinema of Cattet and Forzani. New Horizons 2018, “Midnight Madness” section. A friend – a self-declared fan of giallo and other strands of Italian genre cinema – dragged me to a screening of Let the Corpses Tan, promising juicy, pulpy entertainment. And he wasn’t wrong – bodies did pile up quickly on screen, though ultimately that wasn’t what made the film stand out.

The plot was simple as a wire: a deserted outpost, 250 kilograms of gold, and a 90-minute-long shootout. What contrasted sharply with this bare-bones story was a masterful execution – full of meticulously staged, original shots and experimental editing techniques.

Compared to Let the Corpses Tan, Reflection in a Dead Diamond puts a much stronger emphasis on narrative. The main character is John (Fabio Testi) – a retired spy spending the autumn of his life in a luxurious Riviera hotel. He sips martinis by the sea, occasionally eyeing young women’s bodies. These cheeky observations, straight out of Paolo Sorrentino’s cinema, trigger a flood of memories from his youth, when – under the codename John D. (Yannick Renier) – he exposed international conspiracies and engaged in numerous torrid affairs. As he wanders the seaside landscapes, John becomes increasingly entangled in a web of dreams and memories. Haunted by obsession, he gradually begins to suspect that his nemesis – the elusive Serpentik, who constantly changes identities – has returned, along with a long-awaited chance to settle old scores.

Cattet and Forzani hit the gas pedal from the very start. Something as mundane as sipping a martini on the beach becomes, in their hands, the most thrilling activity in the world. They seek out unexpected angles: the camera briefly dives into the glass, showing us reality through colored liquid, only to then zoom in on the cigarette burning in John’s hand – shown in extreme close-up, with background sounds muted.

The further we go, the bolder the filmmakers become, achieving true mastery in the film’s most brutal scenes. If you thought Quentin Tarantino had perfected the art of stylizing violence, Cattet and Forzani will quickly prove you wrong. Their tools are often simple – the camera doesn’t perform acrobatic movements around life-or-death fights. Instead, their poetic cinema is built from close-ups, details, saturated colors, shadows, striking combinations of shapes. It’s a deeply precise cinema – but also a sensory one, appealing directly to our physical perception. Sound plays an essential role: the rustle of latex on skin, the clink of glass piercing a human face. These sound effects – isolated and highlighted in post-production – often come to the forefront, making the experience even more immersive.

Cattet and Forzani’s films – Reflection in a Dead Diamond being perhaps the best example – are also, maybe above all, cinephilic gems, rich in intertextual references to European genre cinema classics. The duo shows particular affection for 1960s and 70s Italian productions orbiting around giallo and spaghetti westerns. In both style and substance, Reflection in a Dead Diamond primarily draws on the eurospy phenomenon – relatively low-budget Italian spy thrillers produced en masse in response to Bond mania, meant to satisfy European audiences’ appetite for their own version of the genre. But cinema alone is too narrow a medium for Cattet and Forzani’s wild imagination.

In its final moments, the film unexpectedly morphs into a living comic book, visually referencing the Diabolik series. Black-and-white frames clash with bursts of color, proving how thin the line can be between life and art.

And it’s precisely this boundary that seems to be one of the central themes of Reflection in a Dead Diamond. The titular “reflection” turns out to be the final flicker of consciousness of the main character – not a spy per se, but a former star of spy films, now suffering from advanced dementia. The blank spaces in his memory are filled with scenes from the films he once starred in – he can no longer distinguish between what happened to him and what happened to his character. Life and art have merged into an inseparable embrace. I’d give anything to one day see a Bond film made like this – crafted with such formal precision and narrative imagination.