The opening to What Have You Done to Solange? has the ring of familiarity to it. The setting is outdoors on a riverbank, the characters are Elizabeth (winsome English Rose) and Enrico (passionate Italian male). The camera closes in on Elizabeth's eyes as she finally succumbs to the older man's advances when images flash suddenly across the screen - a girl running, an outstretched hand, the flash of a blade - courtesy of some seamless editing. It's an exercise in how unsettling something can be when occurring on a bright sunny day. It also employs Argento's recurrent motif of skewed perception. Elizabeth (Cristina Galbó of The Killer Must Kill Again) is unsure of what she's actually seen and Enrico (Fabio Testi of Revolver, Engima Rosso), exasperated by what he assumes are delay tactics, brings the boat to shore.
The following morning a body has been found on the same stretch of the Thames. A girl from Elizabeth's school has been knifed to death in a manner that will have you crossing your legs for the duration. Having left behind a piece of evidence which places him near the scene of the crime, and later caught on camera among a throng of onlookers by a TV crew covering the story, Enrico (the girls' tutor) finds himself with some explaining to do. It's not long before others fall victim to the maniac, and as pieces of the puzzle are uncovered little by little, the mystery seems tied to a particular clique of students and their association with the enigmatic girl in the title, who left the school suddenly the year before.
Right from the start we're in very assured hands. This is a giallo which pretty much has it all, balancing the stranger in a strange land figure (Enrico) compelled by circumstance to find out his own answers to a series of brutal murders by a black-gloved killer, with a police procedural element which for once is treated with absolute seriousness and a deft touch. Joachim Fuchsberger (The Face of Fu Manchu) as Inspector Barth gives arguably the best portrayal in the genre of an investigator in charge, being neither bumbling comic relief nor bullish, misogynist caricature. Everything is treated with care and reverence, relying on solid fingerprint policing rather than outlandish pseudo-science, which in itself raises the film a few notches above average. Every clue, every red herring, every motive is duly noted and accounted for and used to drive the story along a series of ever darker revelations.
Along the way, Dallamano is careful to anticipate our anticipation and gives little twists throughout to narrative and character. Enrico's wife Herta (Karin Baal) starts life almost as a parody of both the wronged wife and the Teutonic blonde (think Helga from 'allo 'allo with her blouse buttoned up) gradually becoming a more nuanced, genuinely sympathetic individual. Enrico (as the tutor engaged in an affair with one of his students) is painted in shades of grey, rather than as the complete louse we might expect, and when the illusive Solange (Camille Keaton of I Spit on Your Grave infamy whose presence here is something akin to Hitchcock's "smoking gun") makes her entrance via a quirk of serendipity shared with the viewer alone, she resembles a pallid version of Botticelli's Venus, the subtlety of which only becomes clear with time. Even perfectly innocent London street names ("Evelyn Gardens") take on more sinister connotations.
What impresses most is how Dallamano - mindful of his choice of victim - manages to foster a feeling of genuine shock in everyone right down to the minor players, and makes some effort to deal with the after-effects of the killings. A scene where Barth interviews the shell-shocked parents of the first girl is sensitively handled and admirably underplayed. In a neat piece of editing the father's reaction to the facts of his daughter's demise is transported into the following scene at the girl's funeral. The sleazier aspects of this "schoolgirl slasher" are, on the face of it at least, mitigated somewhat by the fact the schoolgirls are actually eighteen (and everyone looks about five years older than they are). The requisite nudity is largely confined to the girls' shower room, and beyond mere titillation these scenes epitomise the film's undercurrents of secrecy and confession, as the girls share whispered confidences while we are led by the camera into collusion with the local peeping tom, POV-style, through a hole in the wall.
In doing so the film points to the viewer and to itself via a form of oblique morality play. It's no coincidence that the river bank murder and Elizabeth's further recall occur during the film's two seduction scenes, symbolically the threat being as much to Elizabeth's virtue from Enrico's ardent wedding tackle (intent on a little death of its own) as much as from the killer's knife. Placed in context, "Solange?" is set in a period when society was still coming to grips with all the swinging that began a decade before. On the surface it's a gripping Italian thriller with all the key elements in place and where the killer's true motive holds water, but at its core it can be viewed as a subversion of the giallo genre, lamenting on innocence lost and the accelerated haste with which child becomes adult (often stumbling in the process) both then and now, leaving its audience to ponder some uncomfortable truths. This is an outstanding entry in the genre and an affecting slice of cinema, with quality dubbing and a widescreen presentation that makes the most of its outdoor settings creating a nostalgia for a London long gone.
