Sixteen years ago Giorgia Cantini (Angela Baraldi) lost her sister Ada (Claudia Zanella) when the latter committed suicide. Now she works as a private detective capturing photographic evidence of women cheating on their husbands. When Giorgia uncovers a box-load of VHS tapes with Ada's video diaries she begins to suspect her death was not so clear cut after all. Against the wishes of her father and boss (Luigi Maria Burruano), she re-opens the door to the past discovering Ada was not only cheating on her husband but also pregnant and dabbling with drugs. Giorgia also enters into an ill-advised romance with Andrea Berti (Gigio Alberti), a pretentious film studies lecturer who turns out to be connected to the case.
There is a long tradition in Italian literature and film of adopting the framework of a murder mystery as means to probe the more challenging existential mysteries of life and the human condition. Think Umberto Eco in the literary stakes or Michelangelo Antonioni when it comes to cinema. Unfortunately such an ambitious agenda carries the risk of collapsing from the weight of an auteur's pretension and presumption that they are above playing by the established rules of the murder mystery format. Such is the case with Quo Vadis, Baby?, another offbeat entry in the ever-eclectic filmography of Italian auteur Gabriele Salvatores. Coming off the back of his excellent sociopolitical childhood thriller I'm Not Scared (2003) this rambling, suffocatingly navel-gazing drama in detective story garb proves a huge disappointment. It is a slippery narrative of flashbacks, video footage, dreams and morose present day melodrama blurred together in a solipsistic manner that contradicts itself incessantly to a tiresome degree.
Set in Bologna, the film was criticized in Italy for the supposed inauthentic presentation of the region along with the actors' accents. However, non-Italian viewers will more likely rankle at the flighty, unsympathetic characters who tread a fine line between psychologically damaged and plain irritating. Salvatores strives for a level of psychological complexity and profundity above, say, your average giallo but still ends up recycling many of the genre's more conservative and misogynistic values only in far less entertaining fashion. Whilst the haggard, middle-aged Giorgia initially seems a refreshingly offbeat protagonist rare within the English language mainstream, her foremost character traits (brittle neuroses hidden behind a veil of indifference) are hardly endearing. Salvatores makes the mistake of characterizing his protagonists entirely by their psychological flaws giving us scant reason to care. Ada is a familiar giallo archetype: the seemingly perfect girl (8mm home movie flashbacks establish that tomboy brunette Giorgia simultaneously resents and idolizes her prettier, more feminine blonde sister) eventually unmasked as a neurotic slut who brings about her own death. Interwoven with the central mystery is a parallel plot where one of Giorgia's clients is accused of murdering his wife. It is not only vague but remains unresolved.
Salvatores' stylish visuals are undeniably striking in parts but too often smack of self-conscious attempts to come across as quirky and cool. This extends to the soundtrack, a hodgepodge of English language New Wave tunes (Joy Division, Talking Heads, the Ramones and a ridiculous sex scene set to "Vienna" by Ultravox), vintage Italian pop and an electro-funk number that sounds like something Goblin might crank out for a Seventies poliziotteschi film. The cine-literate auteur sprinkles his film with references to many classic movies. Not only does the title come from a line in Last Tango in Paris (1972) but Giorgia actually deciphers the mystery by studying several movies including the Bernardo Bertolucci classic which she inexplicably watches on fast-forward. Watching movies proves an arduous task for Giorgia since a childhood viewing of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) left her with a lifelong aversion to cinema. No, really. In fact movies bore Giorgia so much (spoiler warning!) she actually leaves home without bothering to eject a video of M (1931) and thus fails to see the revelation of Ada's actual fate was taped over the climax to Fritz Lang's classic. So there you have it, a detective story where the detective is too lazy to sit through the last clue to the mystery. It boils down to the well-worn Euro art-house theme reasoning that the psychological gap between human beings is insurmountable. But that's bollocks and so is this movie.
