Pupi Avati
La Casa Dalle Finestre Che Ridono

Can a film full of flaws captivate you so much that it becomes one of your favorite films of your (brief) existence? Apparently yes, since The House with Laughing Windows had precisely this effect on me.
Maybe it's because the film was made in 1976, the year I was born, maybe it's because I have a fanatical and, some would say, utterly unfounded adoration for Pupi Avati, maybe it's because I find certain Italian cinema from the '70s attractive, the kind that falls into the early Dario Argento genre, although with due differences, mind you, or maybe it's due to my intrinsic madness… whatever the reason, it only took one viewing of this film for me to be completely enchanted by it.

The plot is quite simple: the protagonist, a renowned restorer, is summoned to a small, forgotten village in the lower Po Valley to restore a newly discovered painting in the village church, attributed to a local painter who committed suicide some time ago and whose body was never found. Strange rumors circulate around the disturbing figure of the artist, and the restorer is immediately targeted by mysterious phone calls urging him to leave, while sly characters hover around him. The village proves to be much less welcoming and peaceful than expected, and dead bodies start appearing like mushrooms. Our hero, of course, will try to unravel the mystery linked to the suicidal artist and his strange relationship with two sisters, a relationship some suggest is incestuous, and will navigate with a sometimes frightened, sometimes bewildered air through the bloody events throwing the village into chaos, involving himself in nonsensical love affairs with two local elementary school teachers, one of whom will accompany him, albeit marginally, throughout the investigation, until the surprising ending and the final twist.

The plot, as you can see, does not excel in originality: the mad artist, the cursed painting, the normality hiding horror are themes explored to the bone by cinema and literature; many of the actors, on the other hand, do not shine for intensity in their performance: Lino Capolicchio, the heroic restorer, almost always holds a somewhat immobile expression, rarely broken by certain looks between shock and astonishment but mostly static, just as the expression of Teacher 2 appears static, the beautiful but anything but good, at least in this film, Francesca Marciano. Even the supporting characters, such as the Inept Policemen, the Peculiar Sacristan, the Swooning Priest, the Protagonist’s Friend, who from the first scene he appears seems to have a label stuck on his forehead reading "HELLO, I DIE FIRST," reach low acting standards. The dialogues are not exactly brilliant, the presence of many scenes almost cut halfway (evidently during editing they hit the Barolo hard) makes some moments almost comical, which probably, in the director’s mind, were intended to be dramatic, and the improbable main scene, far from being scary, makes the audience chuckle more than anything else.

Described like this, it seems like an unwatchable thing, yet… yet the film mesmerizes. The claustrophobic atmospheres captivate, the desolate and squalid landscapes of the Po Valley countryside, the interior settings enchant, these perpetually shadowy houses filled with the unconfessable secrets they harbor, the grotesque, caricatured faces of the village inhabitants captivate, the bizarrely oblivious and almost hilarious way in which they welcome all those suspicious deaths. Perhaps this is precisely where the genius of Pupi Avati lies, one of the greatest geniuses of Italian cinema for a reason: having made a film fascinating that, if made by someone else, would be a mess, made by him it becomes a cult.