Le Orme aka Footprints (1975)

When I was just a child and video was new I used to hang in the videorentalshops and drool over all the horrormovies that absolutely had to be incredibly scary beyond my comprehension. The concept of horror and science fiction being the ultimate crossover was already certain to me at that age and one of the movies that caught my attention was a movie about a woman having visions about an astronaut stranded on the moon. It wasnt until some 25 years later that I realized what movie this was and when Shameless released it on dvd I had to buy it. There wasnt an option. Now, the question is: Would this have scared the crap out of me when I was 8 or 9? Not likely. Actually I think I would've hated it since Footprints isnt exactly fastpaced or very exciting, but since then I've aquired a certain taste for these kind of movies.

Footprints stars Florinda Bolkan as a young woman working as a translator who wakes up one morning and discovers that she has lost three days, no memory of them whatsoever. To top it of she keeps having the same dream over and over again, about an astronaut who is being abandoned on the moon, something she relates to a scifi flick she saw in her youth. She finds a postcard with the picture of a Hotell Garma and and locates in on an island with the same name. She travels there and soon realizes that people there remember her being there during her missing days, but with a wig and an entirely different name. What exactly was her purpose being there and what the hell does that have to do with Klaus Kinski and his experiments on the moon?

Dont go into Footprints expecting a simple mystery. The script, which has the unfortunate feel of being based on a short story stretched out to full length, serves up its explanations in a deliberately slow pace and it's main purpose is to mystify, not explain. Luigi Bazzoni's direction is dreamy and altogether suitable for a movie like this. Vittorio Storaros (Apocalypse Now) photography captures the great locations well and the atmosphere is enhanced by Nicola Piovanis fine score. Florinda Bolkan delivers a good performance, walking around on the island in some sort of daze and it fits with the movies intentions. Yes, it isnt exactly the most straight forward movie I've seen but it has that special kind of ambience that makes you remember it. The two separate plotlines are never really fully explained but the mystery of them are more than enough and the ending delivers a perfectly ambigious twist that is on a first glance rather simple, but still acceptable and gets you thinking on the events that just passed. Not too artyfarty to become some overrated obscurity, Footprints is a fine little mysterymovie but dont go in expecting some sort of a giallo. Then you'd be sorely dissapointed.

An interesting little tidbit is that Shameless release of the movie is rated 18, only because of the the nice trailers from their other releases - the movie itself is rated 12.