Weak Spot


How long do you give a movie to grab your attention?  The curse of the streaming era is that a better option is possibly only click away (full disclosure: I give most blind watches about 10 minutes leeway). But it doesn’t take a full-blown Bond action sequence to do the job, just a subtle creative flourish that hints at more inventiveness to come.  Director Peter Fleischmann’s 1975 film Weak Spot begins with the suicide of a suspect who leaps to his death from a fourth-story window, filmed with no cuts and a clever off-camera body swap to sell the illusion. For a cinephile, that’s a solid indicator that you’re in good hands the rest of the way.

In a nameless country on the mediterranean, Georgis (Ugo Tognazzi) is picked up by the secret service and shuffled from one interrogator to another after being accused of playing a role in a subversive plot.  With no evidence, the Investigator (Michel Piccoli) takes part in an elaborate road-trip designed to coerce a confession or escape attempt. Meanwhile, Georgis, maintaining his innocence, plays his own game of manipulation as the game-within-a-game raises the stakes for both men.

Riffing on the “wrong man” plots popularized by Hitchcock and the existential dread of post-war totalitarianism, Fleischmann’s film manages to have its cake and eat it too.  It’s surface-level pleasures are lifted from familiar spy genre tropes but staged with refreshing ambiguity.  Is Georgis a terrorist? And, if so, is he really the bad guy in a world in which complete subservience to the state is the endgame? And is the unnamed Investigator truly as clueless to the whole plot as he seems. The beauty of Weak Spot is it satisfies those answers by bringing up even more questions.

After the low-key visual cleverness of that opening sequence, Fleischmann lets the script do most of the talking.  Tognazzi, Piccoli and Mario Adorf (a familiar face from Italian poliziotteschi) do a bang-up job of confusing each other and the audience with shifting loyalties and secret agendas.  It’s a cat-and-mouse scenario that never resorts to cheating.  And just when you think you’ve figured out how the trick was pulled off, the film pulls another rabbit out of its hat. 

Radiance presents the film in a 3000-copy limited edition Blu-ray featuring a 4K restoration - which looks fabulous – along with an audio commentary, booklet and interview with soundtrack expert Lovely Jon on the Ennio Morricone score, which foreshadows the theme he’d use later on The Untouchables. 

 

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