Sir Cliffton Reynolds (or maybe
Reynold Cliffton according to the subtitles I had, but either way he’s played
by Eduardo Fajardo) is a London
judge plagued with intense headaches of late.
Dr. Chalmers (Frank Wolff)
tells Cliff that he has about six months left to live, but the good doctor also
has a possible solution. Chalmers
suggests that what Cliff needs is a new brain, comparing his proposed procedure
to the transplanting of primate hearts into humans. Cue Ginetto Lamberti (Simón Andreu), a working man who currently lies dying in the
street, but whose brain is in perfect (this is subjective) working order. But will this transplant prove to be a
transmigration of Ginetto’s soul, or just an excuse for Cliff to go insane?
Juan Logar’s Crystalbrain (aka
L’uomo Dal Cervello Di Cristallo aka Trasplante De Un Cerebro) is an
amalgamation of genres. It owes as much
to gialli as it does to science fiction, as it does to psychothrillers, as it
does to horror. What it harks back specifically
to, however, is the classic The Hands of
Orlac and its profligate progeny.
The earlier story concerns a pianist who has the hands of a murderer
grafted onto his arms, and the “influence” the hands begin to exert on his
psyche. This conceit, that a foreign
body part introduced onto/into a “normal” person having a deleterious effect,
is an intriguing one. It plays both as a
straight horror paradigm and as an investigation of pure human nature. Most people like to think that they are, at
heart, good. But what if you were given
an excuse to unleash your id, to behave in a way antithetical to your public
personality? Characters in these types
of stories believe so deeply that their transplants have power, they allow
their personae to transform, and rarely for the better. Their darkest aspects rise to the
forefront. Many times, they become
obsessed with discovering why their transplant died or with taking revenge on
those who killed them. Who, then, is the
true personality? The one who existed
before the operation or the one who was created afterward? Was one just masking the other? Cliff appears to be a decent person before
his procedure. He believes that “justice
balances right and wrong.” He loves his
wife Susan (Nuria Torray) and his
brother Peter (Angel del Pozo). While he doesn’t turn evil after the
transplant, Cliff certainly becomes more than a little unhinged. One way to look at the ensuing events in his
life is that his sense of morality intensifies and drives him to find closure
in the name of Ginetto by appropriating the Italian fisherman’s psyche.
In this same way, there is the
notion that transplants actually do have power over the transplantee. In these cases, the fantastic element raises
issues of identity and loss of same, perhaps even more than looking at it
through a purely psychological lens. The
introduction of organs not our own suggests an invasion of our body (in fact,
that’s exactly what it is), an attack on who we are. The invader is usually malignant in nature
and more powerful than the host body.
The transplant typically proceeds in wreaking havoc on the
transplantee’s life and loved ones, and there is nothing the weaker of the two can
do because, through the process of the transplant, they are, by definition, no
longer wholly themselves. Their identity
is no longer their own because their bodies are no longer their own, strictly
speaking. In Crystalbrain, this idea is a bit easier to believe because the
human brain is the whole of our conscious being. Our hands may be adept at a certain skill,
but that’s because our mind has trained them to be so. Naturally, this trope also implies in some
way that muscle memory goes further than being the unconscious ability to
perform constantly repeated tasks. Here,
pieces of the donor contain the active personality (or aspects of the
personality) of the donor. The
transplantee, being in a weakened state, is possessed through these parts. It’s a bit like The Thing in that every piece of a donor contains the whole of
him/herself.
We, as an audience, may or may
not buy any of this under normal circumstances.
A hand or a kidney is truly nothing more than a machine (or a part of a
machine) without a power source.
Nonetheless, the big question that comes up in this film is how does
Chalmers not consider that Cliff’s personality would be completely changed by
his operation? When questioned about
this (“Do you think it’s morally responsible to destroy a soul to heal a
body?”), he simply states that doctors have to stave off death whenever they
can. But he’s not saving Cliff’s life. If anything, he’s saving Ginetto’s life by
giving him Cliff’s body. What the hell
kind of medical professional do you have to be to not understand that? The only way to explain it is that Chalmers
believes that our psyche (or here, our “soul”) resides in our whole body, not
just in our skulls (and he’s supposedly a man of science). Frankly, he never should have been given a
medical license, but what can you do?
Logar and company deal with the disparate personalities of Cliff
and Ginetto in a stylistically interesting way.
During Cliff’s surgery, he flashes back to the many people on whom he
has passed judgment, and they each appear in double exposure alongside Cliff as
he pronounces sentence. They are
voiceless; Cliff is in power, and his sense of justice is secure. Later, when Cliff visits the cemetery where
Ginetto’s body is buried, he envisions a series of people who are directly in
his and Ginetto’s lives (Chalmers, Susan, Ginetto himself, et cetera), again in
double exposure, and they all call out to him.
They are now tormenting Cliff. He
is no longer in control of his life or his being, but justice must still be
served. The duality of Cliff and Ginetto
is tied together in this simple way, and I felt it was fairly successful.
The editing of the film is also
fragmented. Time and space change in a
heartbeat with little to no establishment of what’s going on or when these
events take place. Like the Crystalbrain of the title, not only is
Cliff’s mind fragile, ready to be shattered, but the cinematic world these
characters inhabit is equally splintered.
It’s an off-kilter approach, and it reflects what Cliff is going
through. He’s uncertain of who he is
(right up until he’s certain, yet even then…).
His mind is unreliable, and the film’s construction is equally
untrustworthy (although, as with so many foreign films of this ilk and time
period, we can’t be completely certain how many editors’ hands this passed
through), forcing us to fill in blanks and play catch up; essentially placing
us in the protagonist’s shoes to some small degree or another. Admittedly, the film is headscratching in its
logic, and Cliff acts in a manner easy to disbelieve, even with all that’s
happening to him. It treats its supporting
characters like props more than people, and I think this robs the film of the
impact it may have had. Even at
eighty-five minutes, the story is not particularly well-paced, either. And yet, it stands out among its peers, even
if only as a curiosity rather than a revelation.
MVT: The approach to the
narrative is distinctive and interesting, and I would guess that the filmmakers
at least tried to tell their story in a unique fashion.
Make or Break: The scene in
the cemetery, where Cliff (or Ginetto, depending on your perspective)
hallucinates (or does he?).
Score: 6.5/10
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