In a bizarre experiment, an astronaut is abandoned on the moon as Alice (Florinda Bolkan), a troubled translator living in Italy, wakes from a nightmare about a lunar mission mixed with an old movie that frightened her as a child. She also has no recollection of the last three days except for a torn photo of the Garma hotel she finds in her apartment. Fired from her job, Alice heads to that resort island to try and piece together the mystery...
Considered by many to be a psychological (or "bloodless") giallo of the kind made popular by Umberto Lenzi in the late 1960s, FOOTPRINTS is actually a deliberately paced psycho-thriller with sci-fi overtones. Blurring the distinction between dream, reality, memory and movies, the disturbing story is beautifully photographed by Oscar-winner Vittorio Storaro with a pensive score by Nicola Piovani. It also combines elements of such diverse films as Armando Crispino's MACCHE SOLARI and Lucino Visconti's DEATH IN VENICE in it's depiction of alienation, isolation, hallucination, and maybe madness. Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan, on screen all the time, does a redux of her Carol Hammond in Lucio Fulci's A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN as Alice, a young woman thrust into a mystery that makes her question her sanity. The locations mirror Alice's unstable state of mind; the island of Garma, off-season, with it's Arabic influence and ancient ruins, is a lonely, almost mystical place unwilling to give up its secrets. Evelyn Stewart has a bit in the beginning as a concerned friend, Nicoletta Elmi and Oscar-winner Lila Kedrova are hotel guests, Peter McEnery plays a handsome biologist trying to help Bolkan, and the ever-intense Klaus Kinski is "Blackmann" in the film-within-a-film, "Footprints On The Moon".
FOOTPRINTS is a classy case of "Guaranteed 100% Euro-weird" but not for everyone. There's only one murder toward the end but you won't see it coming as the film starts to come together.
Considered by many to be a psychological (or "bloodless") giallo of the kind made popular by Umberto Lenzi in the late 1960s, FOOTPRINTS is actually a deliberately paced psycho-thriller with sci-fi overtones. Blurring the distinction between dream, reality, memory and movies, the disturbing story is beautifully photographed by Oscar-winner Vittorio Storaro with a pensive score by Nicola Piovani. It also combines elements of such diverse films as Armando Crispino's MACCHE SOLARI and Lucino Visconti's DEATH IN VENICE in it's depiction of alienation, isolation, hallucination, and maybe madness. Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan, on screen all the time, does a redux of her Carol Hammond in Lucio Fulci's A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN as Alice, a young woman thrust into a mystery that makes her question her sanity. The locations mirror Alice's unstable state of mind; the island of Garma, off-season, with it's Arabic influence and ancient ruins, is a lonely, almost mystical place unwilling to give up its secrets. Evelyn Stewart has a bit in the beginning as a concerned friend, Nicoletta Elmi and Oscar-winner Lila Kedrova are hotel guests, Peter McEnery plays a handsome biologist trying to help Bolkan, and the ever-intense Klaus Kinski is "Blackmann" in the film-within-a-film, "Footprints On The Moon".
FOOTPRINTS is a classy case of "Guaranteed 100% Euro-weird" but not for everyone. There's only one murder toward the end but you won't see it coming as the film starts to come together.