With the tragic overturning of Roe v. Wade the giallo shocker What Have You Done To Solange? (1972) has a new found relevancy. Though a sensationalist crime thriller, What Have You Done To Solange? deals with the aftermath of a non-professional abortion. The title character (Camille Keaton), who only appears in the third act, has been so traumatized by her experience that she’s become mute and regressed to an “infant-like” state. Solange’s father, overcome with anger, enacts a despicable revenge on Solange’s friends whom he holds accountable.
What Have You Done To Solange? is brimming with misogynistic images and attitudes that preclude any feminist reading of the film. In fact director Massimo Dallamano’s stance seems to be anti-abortion in general. Yet it is the unsafe and unsanitary abortion that motivates the killer, that inspires all of the carnage in the film. It’s this contradiction that makes What Have You Done To Solange? all the more relevant today.
It’s almost ironic that Solange’s homicidal, outraged father should dress as a Catholic priest and murder his victims by stabbing them in the vagina with a large knife. He is clothed in the robes of a religion whose doctrine forces women to seek unorthodox and unsafe abortions which he himself attempts to then act out; literally dramatizing the hypocrisy of such doctrines. It’s this singular dramatizing of violence against women that makes What Have You Done To Solange? so disturbing yet so essential to the discourse surrounding this issue in the cinema.
Dallamano’s background as a cinematographer is more than evident in the look of What Have You Done To Solange?. A master of sleazy genre pictures, Dallamano stuffs his film with as many naked female bodies and as much violence as possible. The milieu of What Have You Done To Solange? is one of a constant potential for violence that, probably unintentionally, replicates the experience of the killer’s victims. What Have You Done To Solange? is a remarkably beautiful grotesque.
Set in London, What Have You Done To Solange? follows an instructor and a police inspector’s (Joachim Fuchsberger) investigation into a series of gruesome murders at a girl’s Catholic high school. The predatory instructor Mr. Rosseni (Fabio Testi) is both suspect and amateur detective. He’s been seducing his students and after the murders begin has to clear his name of the violent crimes. Rosseni serves as the protagonist of the film while his arc makes for its primary red herring.
In the pantheon of popular giallo films What Have You Done To Solange? is one of the most famous and influential. Like Don’t Torture A Duckling (1972), What Have You Done To Solange? has many of the plot devices of a police procedural drama. Although Dallamano never achieves the same complex melding of genres as Lucio Fulci, he has created one of the most disquieting entries of the genre.
