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A dripping faucet grows into a raging gush over the opening credits, the bathtub is about to overflow but the faded flame (Diana Dors) is busy putting on lipstick and bringing a razor to her wrists, her daughter (Linda Hayden) stumbles upon the body. Next seen, the working-class nymphet is introduced to the posh home of Mum's old lover (Keith Barron), the ideal stage for the "wicked child" shenanigans that are to come. Numbed paterfamilias and spindly scion (Derek Lamden) are both subjected to the visitor's wiles, though it's the doleful matriarch (Ann Lynn) who falls the hardest, intoxicated by maternal yearning and uncorked Sapphic ardor. "A little rough meat still finds its way into the British market." The state of the bourgeois family at the close of the Swinging Sixties, not Lolita but Buñuel's Susana. The nubile orphan looks on as the stranger's clammy hand creeps up her knee in the darkened movie theater, but she's no vamp—sex is her currency and her instrument of communication, faddish psychoanalysis ("You like older men, like a father") is laid bare as ludicrously deficient in dealing with the wily survivor. Zooming and shock-cutting in nightclubs and bedrooms, Alastair Reid unleashes a bravura bit of fear and desire with an unbroken, five-minute panning shot that follows Hayden and Lamden from the sun-dappled river's edge into the darkening forest with a gang of louts. "Don't you want to play with your little doll?" Vacant fields surrounding industrial plants clinch the alliance to Teorema, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is concurrent as a tastefully declawed version of the tale. With Dick Emery, Patience Collier, and Sheila Steafel.
--- Fernando F. Croce |