Simply Perfect

A Major Disappointment

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The translator Alice Cespi (Florinda Bolkan) has nightmares with an astronaut left alone on the moon and is addicted in sleeping pills. When she goes to work, she is fired since she missed three days without any justification. She returns home and finds a torn postcard of the Garma Hotel in Garma and decides to visit the seaside touristic place. She stumbles upon the weird girl Paola Bersel (Nicoletta Elmi), the stranger Harry (Peter McEnery) and other locals that believe she is a woman called Nicole. Along the days, Alice tries to unravel the mystery of her missing days."Le orme", a.k.a. "Footprints on the Moon", is a weird film with a dream-like atmosphere. The intriguing mystery is supported by magnificent performance of Florinda Bolkan and great cinematography. However the confused story disappoints the viewer that expects a conventional giallo with gore, murders and sex. My vote is five.Title (Brazil):"Os Passos" ("The Steps")

This film blew me away. It captured me right from the start of the movie. The longer you watch, the more is revealed but the more confusing and stranger it becomes... builds to a super climax into a bang up ending that will leave you wondering when the credits role.Is Alice really Alice? If not, is she Nichole? What in the heck does Alice/Nichole's nightmares of astronauts have to do with it? Has Alice/Nichole gone mad? Is all this real? And many more questions will arise during the viewing of this film.I acquired this film from the Sci-Fi Invasion 50-Pack. And this is most definitely one of the best films in the collection. The movie is worth watching if you like mystery-thrillers. I fell in-love with the movie the first time I watched it.9/10

Unable to cope with mounting pressures at work and haunted by visions of a lone astronaut abandoned on the surface of the moon, Alice travels to the exotic sea side town of Garma to get away from it all. She encounters a number of people there who claim to know her from earlier as Nicole, even though she insists this is her first time there. Brazillian born Florinda Bolkan turns in a solid performance as the elusive Portugese translator caught in the grips of a fugue. A strange but oddly compelling existential mystery about dual identities and self-fulfilling prophecies, Footprints on the moon is more reminiscent of art-house favorites such as Antonioni's L'aventura and Passenger and Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, than say other Mystery/Thriller Genre fare so popular at the time in Italy. The story unfolds at a languorous pace and things get redundant after a while, but it does allow Cinematographer extraordinaire Vittorio Storaro to really explore the unique locations and dazzle with his wonderfully dexterous camera-work. He furthers the style he pioneered in The Conformist. Also, watch out for Klaus Kinski in a small role as a sinister Space Commander on the lookout for guinea pigs to conduct his secret experiments for a shadowy Government agency. Yes, I'm talking about the same movie.

Interesting and entertaining 'mind game', dream-like, moody mystery, as a woman can't account for several lost days of her life, or why so many people at a resort she's never visited seem to know her. She's also haunted by very odd black and white dreams where an astronaut is betrayed and left to die alone on the moon. The film is slow in parts, and some of the big twists are easy to see coming, but it is beautifully photographed by Vittorio Storraro, and eschews the gratuitous violence and awkward sex of most of the Italian thrillers of the era. This doesn't feel like its trapped by any formula or rules. And the acting is pretty good for a dubbed film. Not in the class of films like 'Don't Look Now" or "Vertigo", but gets points for trying to be and doing so in a classy way. I'll be interested to see this again.