Filmed at the Palazzo Borghese in Villa Borghese, Rome, which also contains the Largo Borghese, where we had a picnic with a Turkish family. Borghese!
They say that the first thing you taste food with is with your eyes, so it's good that this film has a lot of food in it. Wait, that's not right.
In a question of form over function, if I see another slow motion lesbian sex scene in another giallo my arm will cease to function wait that's not what I'm getting at.
Let's try again. A White Dress for Mariale begins with Mariale as a child watching her cuckolded father gun down his cheating wife and her nude lover in a park before turning the gun on himself. Years later, Mariale has turned into Ida Galli, who lives in a big mansion (of course) with angry husband Luigi Pistilli, who constantly feeds her tranquilisers. Ida, it turns out, has sent out invitations to a bunch of freaks and intends to hold a party.
These freaks include Ivan Rassimov, an old flame of Mariale. I can't remember the names of any other guy. There's an impotent guy and his frisky wife Mercedes, or was his wife the black girl Semy (who tries it on with a suit of armour – that's a new one). Who knows. I don't even know why they were there in the first place.
Mariale takes them all down to the basement which is full of very strange mannequins wearing dresses. She then invites everyone to dress up (one guy picks a ballerina outfit, Ivan dresses up like a pageboy etc. Mariale herself dresses up in the white dress her mother wore when she was killed – complete with the bullet holes. I think at this point Luigi gave up and wandered upstairs to watch football while everyone else got completely wasted.
This whole sequence is all rather trippy and reminded me of some of Peter Greenaway's work – what with all the food and colour schemes. I was rather taken aback at Semy's choice of dress being an orange robe and a double strap-on dildo, but then she hits it off with Mercedes later so maybe she needed it. I did begin to wonder, around the fifty minute mark, whether anything was actually going to happen in this film. Luckily, someone starts knocking off the gets in a bloody fashion. Semy in particular meets a nasty end by being smashed to a pulp in a swimming pool.
I suppose no one signs up for a giallo and expects anything profound, so the barrage of crazy visuals and silky camera work make up for the endless soap opera bickering and the fact that there's virtually no story to speak of. It does have a few stand out moments (like one guy being killed by a pack of dogs) but I was scratching my head at the end. Who was the killer?
If food was your eyes, then your stomach would feed on oh bugger off.
