Footprints

This surreal Italian thriller from 1975 looks better than ever thanks to a brandnew 4K Blu-ray restoration. For those unfamiliar with the movie, you’re in for a treat! Florinda Bolkan stars as a young interpreter who can’t remember what happened in the past three days of her life and sets out to solve the mystery.

Alice Cespi (F. Bolkan) lives in an apartment in Rome where she works as an interpreter though when she turns up for work, she is fired by her boss on grounds that she missed three days of work without her calling in sick. Alice has no recollection whatsoever as to what may have happened during those three days that she didn’t turn up for work and it’s only when her boss points out that an important conference Alice thought is happening today actually happened three days ago… Alice, who is heavily dependent on tranquilisers ever since she watched a Sci-fi movie called ‘Footprints on the Moon’ as a child and which left her traumatized, has to acknowledge that indeed she can’t recall as to what happened those past few days and accepts her dismissal. In the film, that she saw as a child, an astronaut is controlled by Blackman (Klaus Kinski), the evil puppet-master behind a lunar landing during which an astronaut is left to die. These disturbing visions creep up time and time again and keep on haunting Alice to this day.

Desperately trying to piece together the missing days, only a few items might provide a clue, namely a missing earring (what happened to the other one?), a yellow dress with bloodstains on it and above all, a crumpled postcard she finds in her kitchen bin – depicting a hotel in the idyllic and very Byzantine looking seaside resort of Garma. Without knowing exactly why, Alice travels to Garma – a place as labyrinthine as the complex workings of her befuddled mind. Sure enough, she finds the hotel in question and rents a room but from that moment onwards, things become stranger by the minute: some locals claim to have seen her on the island before, although as a woman by the name of Nicole and with red hair. She also comes across a rather odd girl named Paula Burton (Nicoletta Elmi), who is on vacation in Garma with her parents and seems to develop a strange rapport with Alice – Paula also claims to have seen Alice before but with long red hair…

Alice also makes the acquaintance of Henry (Peter McEnery), a handsome looking friendly young man who offers her a lift to the hotel and she keeps bumping into him repeatedly… does he know anything about her though more importantly, does he resemble a figure from Alice’s past? Slowly but surely, Alice comes to accept that she was in Garma before but what was she doing there and why does she have no recollection of being there? Is the current timeframe she’s moving in even the present or can her warped mind no longer differentiate between reality and fiction? And what about the bloodstains on her yellow dress she discovered back in her Rome apartment?

This is a slow-burning Giallo and Florinda Bolkan (‘Flavia, the Heretic’) gives an intense and very nuanced performance as a deeply disturbed young woman who is clearly unable to differentiate between dream/nightmare and reality. At the other end of the spectrum is McEnery’s ‘Henry’ – a very anchored and well-meaning soul whose attempts to help the increasingly disturbed Alice has fatal consequences.
The unusual setting only heightens the puzzle and some of the characters take on multiple identities – at least in Alice’s mind, for example, is Henry actually someone called Harry? And how much can she trust little Paula Burton – a girl with an apparently overactive imagination…

Cinematographer Vittoria Storaro captures the strange and isolated beauty of the film’s byzantine setting, while Nicola Piovani’s score adds to the strangeness.

FOOTPRINTS (original title: LE ORME) offers the following Special Features:

- Three cuts of the film: Director's integral Cut (96 mins), Director's integral Cut with Italian Credits (96 mins) and USA Version (94 mins)
- ‘Remembering the Moon’ introduction by star Florinda Bolkan
- ‘Master of Light’ interview with Vittorio Storaro
- ‘To the Moon’ interview with Ida Galli aka Evelyn Stewart
- Audio commentary by Film-Critic Genre-Expert Rachael Nisbet
- Original Italian theatrical trailer
- New English Subtitles over the Optional Original Italian + switchable SDH over the English language version
- Full HD 1080P encode from restored 4K scans of the original camera negative in 1.85:1 widescreen