REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND

Retired septuagenarian gentleman John D. is languishing his days away at a swanky French beachside resort when the beautiful young woman next door disappears, sending him spiraling into the past. Once a hotshot international superspy at the top of his game, he’s haunted anew by the memory of the fateful mission, the sequin-clad secret agent, and the sultry, shape-shifting villainess in fetish wear, Serpentik, that collide in his melancholic reveries. Is he waxing sentimental, trapped in an existential limbo — or still caught in the crosshairs of his old enemies?

Slicing with head-spinning freneticism between John D. in the present and his suave younger self, filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani unleash bursts of impeccably stylized sensuality and violence as they simultaneously craft a lavish genre deconstruction and loving homage to 1960s espionage and exploitation cinema icons, from James Bond to Mario Bava’s Diabolik. In their audacious hands — and with gorgeous production design, costumes, and a few memorably deployed fish hooks — kaleidoscopic layers of nostalgia, identity, and cinema blur into a mesmerizing arthouse pastiche that reveals that time is truly the ultimate enemy.