Fantasia Obscura: ‘Tunnel Under the World’

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, it feels like some people get graded on a deep curve…

The Tunnel Under the World (Il Tunnel Sotto Il Mondo) (1969)
Distributed by: Idea Film
Directed by: Luigi Cozzi

Now, let me see if I got this straight…

You have a story, with an interesting title, written by an American science fiction author in 1955, prompting a student film with that same title that gets expanded into a feature just as a “soft civil war” is breaking out…

Oooo-kaaayyyy…

Please note there will be spoilers for the source material, and if we’re lucky maybe the film itself…

We’re told in flashing red-on-black graphics that it is “32 LUGLIO,” which for non-Italian speakers makes it July 23^rd. We then get shots of a man (Alberto Moro, presumably, as there are no reliable sourcesving us the roles of everyone appearing in the film, only that they were in the cast) walking through the city, who stares up at the clock on the bell tower. He sees the time, about 12:28 PM, and heads to a door under the tower

He goes to an arsenal in a closet, picks out a sniper rifle, then gets his position on his target. Bruno Salviero (presumably the same person with that name in the cast), unaware of what’s about to take place, is casually walking through the market.

Our assassin gets his target in sight, and hits Bruno…

…who suddenly wakes up in bed, still tired because his bad dream disturbed him. He has breakfast with his wife (Anna Mantovani, maybe…?), which feels like an ordeal as we watch him eat while talking to her.

Bruno then walks to work this bright July day, past the piles of snow on the street, near a wall where large banner advertisements for products are posted. He admits to an interviewer following him, presumably the person holding the camera, that he’s unhappy in his marriage.

We follow Bruno to the glass box skyscraper where he works in the human resources section of a company that’s never really defined, then comes home to his uninspired marriage before he goes to bed.

At which point we then see our assassin again, who takes out Bruno in much the same way we’d watched before. Bang, sulk, walk, repeat…

It’s when it happens yet again that things change, when Bruno interviews a young woman. She’s played by same actress we saw as Bruno’s wife, but apparently is an entirely different person.

During the interview, Bruno mentions to his new hire that she’s expected to sleep with the company’s clients, as part of a “hospitality” aspect of whatever business Bruno’s company is engaged in. Initially, it looks like she turned down the job, but runs into Bruno on his way home to say she’s interested.

She offers to sleep with Bruno, who turns her down because he’s married, but the two of them come up to her place to have coffee with her father.

Yes, her father is the same person (or at least payed by the same actor) that has been killing Bruno in his dreams every night. It’s a pretty pleasant conversation here, though, as dad reminisces about his days as a member of parliament in the Chamber of Deputies during the gathering.

When it’s done, despite his saying he wouldn’t cheat on his wife, Bruno cheats on his wife with the new hire, because Italian cinema in the 1960s, for a start…

He wakes up and guiltily calls his wife, who informs him before Bruno can identify himself that her husband just left for work. In a panic, he calls his office from a payphone and spends a few seconds talking to himself on the other end of the phone, before he wanders away, his mind a bit blown.

And from there, things get… fuzzy…

Up to this point, the film sticks close to the original source material, or at least stays in the same dimension with it. Frederick Pohl’s short story of the same name, published in the January of 1955 issue of Galaxy, is a pretty straightforward story about a man who wakes up and relives the same day over and over again until he finds a way to keep his mind from being reset.

Our hero, Guy Bruckhardt, realizes that each day has been almost identical, except that there is encroaching pervasive advertising around him at every turn. Once he discovers the truth, that Guy is just a simulation maintained in someone’s basement to allow the owner of the table he’d been running around on to test advertising campaigns, he gets readjusted and goes back to his repetitive life existence.

And the film somewhat follows the story up to here. There’s even a moment when a character in the film notes that she came back in a younger and more beautiful body, suggesting that she was like April Horn in Pohl’s story. Beyond that, especially as we move further into the movie, the connections are lost in the chaos of shots that Cossi assaults us with.

<Pic: TUW09; Caption: “Scenes from Italian protests during the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969”>

The times surrounding Cossi as the film was made were likely a contributing factor. The wave of strikes by students and workers had hit a fever pitch, and would soon lead to the “Anni di piombo” (the “Years of Lead”) as frustration gave way to violence. It was a time of anger, when everything was challenged and no one would compromise.

Keeping that in mind helps to explain Cossi’s decisions as far as how he shot the film, often with a handheld camera where he was either unwilling or unable to keep everyone in the frame. The quick cuts and insertions of random street scenes shot through gels and other visual choices captures the spirit of the time, especially for someone who was at university just as his school’s students stormed the administration’s buildings.

And that’s probably the closest we’re going to get to any form of explanation here, as telling the story here loses out to wild directorial challenges that never seem to pay off. Admittedly, this is often the case in most student films, such as Ridley Scott’s Boy and Bicycle, David Lynch’s The Alphabet, Martin Scorsese’s The Big Shave, or George Lucas’ Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB. Considering how each of these directors made mistakes and learned from them, you would like to assume that Cossi would also learn from the experience.

Well-l-l-l-l…

If anything, what makes Cossi’s films what they are is his tendency to pleasure the eyes at the expense of the mind. It’s a habit he never broke in any of his subsequent films, and in his expanded student film he embraces his destined shtick fully. At no point since has anyone taken him aside to explain how frustrating his films can be to watch.

If anything, this first effort was embraced wholeheartedly by one of Cossi’s friends he’d met during his journalism career, Dario Argento. Thanks to this connection, Cossi’s career was launched on an angry film that started to say something about how little we can trust our reality before it lost the thread and just kept distracting us.

Do I have this straight now? I hope so…