Discerning a parallel between the feral creature masterly incarnated by Michel Piccoli and the figure of the film director is almost inescapable. He goes round the house like a sleuth, equally attracted by a seductive woman and a rusty old contraption. He experiences the surroundings with juvenile interest, showing the same cynical detachment while skilfully cooking, recording normal sounds, reviving memories on the wall, licking honey on a pearly skin, or building a functioning pistol to then make it an improbable work of art—like a tormented storyteller in search of subjects, and his own self, as tedium triggers creativity in the most unexpected ways. Dillinger è morto is at once a daring existentialist satire and a witty reflection on the nature of cinema. So, is Dillinger really dead?
In Marco Ferreri’s inspired vision, identity crumbles as things are progressively dispossessed, becoming an addictive object of curiosity for the senses. Seamlessly assuming the form of an apartment, or a playroom, the world is designed by a bored man that clashes with the impossibility of designing himself as a human being, and so as such fails. Gestures and interactions lose their meaning fed by an aimless intellectual need for exploration that fails too, eventually reverting to the trivial. Touching, watching, tasting, hearing—like a child, he acknowledges his being an alien to the world he created around himself, and fleets from the nonsense to the unknown, to experience the illusion of a new excitement while nothing will stop the setting of a sun also made of plastic.
