Queer Angst and Freedom Set Giallo A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin Apart
Even before the hallway she’s in transforms from a coach corridor to a residential entrance full of naked strangers, Florinda Bolkan’s heaving breaths sound erotic. As Carol Hammond, the actress transmits a calm anxiety as she runs from her stalker, frantically shaking door handles and wrestling through the orgy of writhing bodies before falling slowly into a black abyss. Spread upon red satin, a slender, blonde woman awaits her, wearing nothing but a black robe. Smiling seductively, the stranger removes Carol’s fur coat, lowers her gently onto the bed and kisses her softly, their nude figures sliding against each other. For all of the film’s low-budget cheesiness, the opening dream sequence to Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) remains as mesmerizing as ever.
Born from a genre that challenges the concept of rigid compositional categories while also eschewing a number of thematic and stylistic tropes that make it instantly recognizable, the film remains a strange bundle of many such contradictions over half a century after its release. A 105-minute priapism that’s terrified of sex, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is an utterly ridiculous yet ideologically grounded (even somewhat progressive) male fantasy that indulges in violence and eroticism to varying degrees of self-awareness. Written and directed by a major purveyor of Italian giallo whose adherence to the genre’s fetishes implicate him in its sexism almost by default, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin still somehow includes one of the more compelling onscreen depictions of female desire to come out of the 1970s.
A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin deals with its queer subject matter explicitly, revolving around a sexually repressed London housewife named Carol (obviously) who has erotic dreams about her bombshell next-door neighbor, Julia (Anita Strindberg). Adding another layer of complications to our protagonist’s psychosexual frustrations is the counterculture movement that had ruptured the West by the time the film was released. It’s a lifestyle Julia has fully embraced, regularly hosting extravagant, LSD-saturated orgies in her apartment, and one that Carol is denied by virtue of marriage and upper-class expectations. (Her father, Edmund Brighton, is a wealthy lawyer and politician, and her husband, Frank Hammond, works at his law firm.)
After one of her dreams culminates in murder, Carol wakes up to discover that Julia has been killed in real life—and she’s the main suspect. As the evidence against her piles upwards, she’s arrested and charged with murder, then placed in a maximum security sanitorium where she awaits trial. Following her unreliable POV, it’s at first unclear if Carol really did do it—but of course, Fulci introduces several more suspects through various twists over the course of the film’s runtime, prompting her husband and father to do some investigating of their own.
From Ingrid Pitt’s turn as a sapphic vampire in Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) to Vicente Aranda’s predatory take on Carmilla in The Blood Spattered Bride (1972), sexually transgressive media from the 1970s was no stranger to the psycho lesbian trope. However, by making the ostensible killer the protagonist of his film and having her straddle the line between victim and perpetrator, Fulci makes Carol ring true to the experience of anyone who’s ever been in the closet. In a culture that threatens shame upon those with deviant sexualities and forces people to suppress their desires often to the point of self-denial, this can result in a heavy psychological toll.
On the surface, Fulci’s pathologizing of his female protagonist is nothing groundbreaking; gialli remain notorious for putting women through the ringer, fetishizing the female form along with the violence so often perpetrated against it. However, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is notable in how it subverts these themes while also indulging in them; it’s self-aware of men’s fear of autonomous female desire and imbues the male characters’ limited perspectives of Carol with irony. Maybe it’s because of this that Fulci’s film still holds up so well over 50 years after its release, operating under the genre’s twisty whodunnit structure to reflect different levels of queer shame and angst.
Nowadays, creators will bend over backwards in an effort to rationalize a lack of sapphic visibility in a popular culture that demands it, often arguing that depicting women as single is somehow more or equally progressive than portraying them in same-sex relationships. This, of course, is a fallacy; it goes without saying that romance is not an extension of the patriarchy and lesbian relationships are, by definition, even less so. As such, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is also notable in how it ties Carol’s relationship with Julia to her freedom—sexual and otherwise. A first-time viewer may empathize with Carol in the film’s early scenes, especially since she seems consciously wary of her own domestic lifestyle.
“Even a husband can be good-mannered,” she tells her stepdaughter, Joan, after the latter questions why Frank should have to ask permission to enter Carol’s bedroom.
In a later scene, Carol sits with her family around the dinner table, quietly tapping her foot to the loud music playing from Julia’s apartment next door, as if yearning for a freedom that seems within grasp. Trapped in the confines of this passionless existence, Julia’s loud and extravagant lifestyle almost translates as gasconade.
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