Hitchcock's influence hangs heavily, and uneasily, over Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Daguerrotype, a film made in France where it bears the title La Secrete de Chambre Noir. Kurosawa specializes in horror films and the picture features two ghosts and a haunted house. The mansion inhabited by the ghosts is located on property that stands in the way of a real estate development and, for a time, there is a suggestion ala Diabolique or Scooby Doo that the spooks are contrived for ulterior and criminal purposes -- here to terrify the landowner into surrendering fee simple to his title to the developer's goons. Kurosawa nods in this direction but its a red herring and, in fact, his ghosts are apparently supposed to be the real thing. The picture is shot with the deliberate pace that we expect in an art-house production and the film is exceptionally handsome and well-acted albeit in a monotonous way. But it's schlock and, at 135 minutes, at least three-quarters of an hour too long.
A young man, Jean, answers an ad to become a famous photographer's assistant. The photographer, Stephane, lives in a spooky and decaying manor on the edge of Paris -- he has a hulking butler who looks just like Jean Renoir. Stephane was once a famous fashion photographer and he uses archaic equipment to take his portraits, daguerreotype photographs with silver emulsion that require exposures, at least, 20 minutes long. Stephane, who bears a startling resemblance to the comic Louis C. K., has been obsessively photographing his daughter since his wife hanged herself. Stephane's pictures of his daughter involve exposures as long as 120 minutes and the girl has to be wired into an apparatus to keep her upright -- this device made of stainless steel with many hooks and barbs looks like a medieval instrument of torture and it's terrifying to behold. Stephane is shown photographing a dead baby resting in a cradle with the grieving parents standing next to the child and the first hour of the film is genuinely creepy -- the ruinous mansion has eerie aura and the apparitions are startling. There's one terrifying scene in which a ghost materializes, lures Stephane's daughter into the basement and, then, seems to hurl the girl down the stairs when she ascends the steps out of the chambre noir ("the dark room") -- we see the girl climbing the steps; she reaches the top of the frame and the camera lingers on the empty basement. We expect something scary to happen and are shocked to see the girl crashing down the steps, turning deadly looking somersaults as she falls. (There's an explanation for this, of sorts: the mad photographer has been using a powerful muscle relaxant to paralyze his daughter for the long exposures -- this seems to have caused her fall.) The film accelerates into high gear for a few nightmarish minutes as Jean tries to get the limp girl to the hospital. Somehow, he loses her body when he crashes the car. Then, we see the girl emerge out of pitch darkness, apparently somehow resurrected. The rest of the film involves Jean's efforts to get Stephane to sell the mansion -- there's a lot of drinking and Jean seems to be in cahoots with Marie, Stephane's daughter. Kurosawa stages some scary apparitions but the film doesn't go anywhere special and, more or less, peters out. I could have improved this film 100% with a better ending that's implicit in the material but that Kurosawa somehow missed. We have seen Stephane taking daguerreotype pictures of the dead. In my version, the mad photographer would use the apparatus for posing his subjects to install his dead daughter in the basement where he would photograph her decomposition. SPOILER ALERT: the girl is dead anyhow and the hero merely fantasizes that she is alive (or, perhaps, is realistically copulating with a ghost). I would set up a reveal where the young lover goes into the basement and finds the rotting corpse of his girlfriend suspended on the posture-apparatus, posing for her father's huge daguerreotype camera. The horror! the horror!
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