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The deceptive polish of surfaces extends to the technique, the insipid romanticism of the first images is swiftly pierced: The carriage ride morphs into a flogging, the top-hatted coachmen are horny brutes, it's all in the mind of the chic Parisian blonde (Catherine Deneuve). (Into De Palma's Dressed to Kill the whole sequence goes.) Hubby (Jean Sorel) is a surgeon, twin beds update the marital punchline of the buried couple from Un Chien Andalou. The insinuating roué (Michel Piccoli) gives her the nudge she needs, she visits the brothel out of curiosity or boredom or perhaps some illicit need, thus "la femme aux deux visages." Madam (Geneviève Page) runs an elegant establishment and dotes on her niece's school grades, the proper bourgeois wife thrives there on weekday afternoons. She's sprawled face-down in a messy chamber following a particularly hearty client, her head is raised to reveal Deneuve's captivating half-smile of carnal exaltation curtained by a tousled mane. "Do you come here often?" "Every day in my thoughts." Luis Buñuel dreaming along with his Ice Princess, mingling reality and fantasy to acerbically, delicately contemplate the enigma of erotic identity. Old Europe is an elongated nobleman (Georges Marchal) with necrophiliac kinks, the Nouvelle Vague is a gaudy hoodlum (Pierre Clémenti) with black cane and metallic teeth. Stroheim's The Merry Widow, "a cute compulsion, as the English say," Lubitsch's Angel. Jingling bells and buzzing boxes, the alabaster skin that trembles for black mud. (Bulls named Remorse and Expiation give the joke on interpretation, the backstory is a feint on Giulietta degli Spiriti.) It leads to Sleeping Beauty awake and Prince Charming paralyzed, as befits a clinical fairy-tale and a poetic case study, the happy ending conjured up is the mark of a free heroine and a free director. Cinematography by Sacha Vierny. With Françoise Fabian, Francisco Rabal, Macha Méril, Maria Latour, Marguerite Muni, Francis Blanche, François Maistre, and Iska Khan.
--- Fernando F. Croce |