We see blue-tinted footage of a moon landing, but when an astronaut comes out of the vehicle, he is dragging an unconscious astronaut out who is left on the moon. We see a man named Blackmann at Mission Control shouting instructions. Then we see a woman wake up. She has apparently been dreaming of a movie she saw years ago called Footprints on the Moon. The woman, Alice, a translator living in Italy, discovers she is missing any memory of the last three days and is in danger of losing her job. She then finds strange things in her apartment including a torn-up postcard of a hotel on the Turkish island of Garma, and a bloodstained dress in her closet. She also has visions of an Oriental room with stained glass windows featuring peacocks. Visiting Garma hoping to find answers, she winds up facing more mysteries. People on the island remember her but as a redhead named Nicole. A handsome young man named Harry gets chummy with her, and she vaguely recognizes him, but she hears more unsettling things about Nicole and her paranoid behavior and finds the red wig she wore on the island as Nicole. Visions of the moon movie and the peacock window continue. By this time, I was worrying that lots of details were accumulating that would all not amount to much. Well, we do eventually get a surface explanation of what’s going on, and it turns out that Harry knew her briefly years ago when they were teenagers and and interacted with her a few days earlier as Nicole. When Harry takes her to his family's house, she sees the peacock windows. Is Alice having a breakdown? Is she suffering from some past trauma? Are her paranoid feelings justified?
If you like your psychological mysteries wrapped up tight, this is not the film for you. [I'll try to avoid obvious spoilers, but I do need to bring up a couple of plot twists.] We get some answers in a lengthy sequence at the end, but those are potentially undercut by the visuals of the last few minutes, which leaves open the possibility that the sinister Blackmann (a cameo from Klaus Kinski, and how much more sinister can you get?) is real and not an old movie memory. This, however, brings up unanswered questions. My theory, and one which I have not seen voiced online yet, is that Alice is experiencing some past sexual trauma, as we see a flashback which implies that Harry and Alice had sex in their teenaged past. It's not presented as coerced, but still it's there as a plot thread that isn't worked into the narrative. If you can deal with an ending that leaves you to interpret the situation, I recommend this. The director, Luigi Bazzoni, filmed in the Turkish town of Phaselis which allows him to indulge an attention to architecture and physical place that rivals Antonioni's, and the visuals, though mostly caught under cloudy skies, are attractive. The Brazilian Florinda Bolkan (Alice/Nicole, at top left) gives a one-note performance (that note being confused paranoia) but it's called for her, as her character's background remains largely obscure—if it was a little clearer, the ending would be clearer as well. British actor Peter McEnery (right) is nicely laid back as Harry, which balances out Bolkan's more intense performance. [BTW, virtually all online sources including IMDb refer to his character as Henry, but in the English version I watched, they were clearly saying Harry. Plus, there is a quick shot of him wearing a necklace that says Harry.] The Oscar nominated Russian actress Lila Kedrova has the only other substantive role as a tourist who remembers Alice as Nicole. Some giallo lineage is claimed by some critics because Bazzoni directed a well regarded giallo called The Fifth Cord, but there is little sex or gore, and it's not really a whodunit. I'd never heard of this but it came up in YouTube's algorithm for me and I'm glad to have run across it. The print I saw was clear and sharp, but I think that may have been taken down, and the one that is still up is presented with awful widescreen distortion. Avoid that one. It’s been released recently by a British company on Blu-ray. [YouTube]
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