LE ORME

LE ORME

Directors: Luigi Bazzoni

Cast: Florinda Bolkan, Klaus Kinski, Peter McEnery, Lila Kedrova

Footprints on the Moon (Italian: Le orme, lit. 'The Footprints', also released as Primal Impulse) is a 1975 Italian giallo film written and directed by Luigi Bazzoni, and starring Florinda Bolkan, Peter McEnery, Klaus Kinski and Lila Kedrova. It concerns Alice (Bolkan), a translator with an unexplained two-day gap in her memory who follows clues to a mysterious seaside town for answers, where the unfamiliar residents seem to recognize her as a different woman named Nicole.

“Le Orme” (a/k/a “Footprints on the Moon” and “Primal Impulse”) has been described variously as an Italian giallo, a sci-fi film, a mystery, or a psychological thriller. Ultimately, it defies pigeonholing. It stars Florinda Bolkan as Alice Cespi, a professional translator, who is tormented by a recurring nightmare; in it, a lunar-landing team deliberately abandons a colleague on the moon’s surface as part of a scientific experiment. Alice arrives for work one day and is summarily canned. The reason? She’d walked out of an international astronomy conference and disappeared for three days, incommunicado. Those three days are a complete blank for her. Alice finds a few vague clues -- a torn postcard from Garma, a resort she’s never visited; an earring, a unfamiliar bloody yellow dress that fits her perfectly -- and sets out to learn what has happened. When she arrives in Garma, all of the strangers are delighted to see her “again” -- but claim that she's another person entirely. And that’s just the beginning… Although the storytelling in “Le Orme” is fairly linear, it's also disorienting -- so you’ll have to pay attention to it. There are blind alleys, red herrings and (possibly) misleading implications throughout. Cast includes Bolkan, Peter McEnery, Nicoletta Elmi, and a cameo by Klaus Kinski. Titles and credits are in Italian, but all dialogue is in English. (In an earlier forum post, oldbones noted that “For [Primal Impulse]...check for a missing or invalid notice. That is the ONLY way they would be pd.” The movie has no copyright notice at all.)

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