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The opening credits have the joke, evangelical pamphlets out of a stone gargoyle's mouth. A churning English house, the husband (Denholm Elliott) is in the faith business and secretly yearns for annihilation, his wife (Joan Plowright) still believes in miracles, their daughter (Suzanna Hamilton) is noisily comatose, struck by a truck after catching daddy in flagrante. To them an infernal therapist, the twitchy pickpocket (Sting) introduced munching on a gutter carrot outside a cathedral. (He cups his ears at church bells and comes a-knocking after dinner.) The "peaceful art" of housekeeping, denied as Beckett would have it, the nightmare that interweaves guilt and subterranean desire. "A definite human light" breaks through at last, it leaves a shattered suburban window at night. "Why do we have to be so bloody melodramatic?" Dennis Potter's own Teorema, his Gothic Tartuffe, Richard Loncraine shoots it richly through a wide-angle lens. The would-be estranged suitor wants to be alone with his incapacitated prey, music-box tinkling scores the violation while The Go-Go's on the Victrola back his malign stare into the bedroom mirror. (Elsewhere in the ecclesiastical shop, the paterfamilias scolds the owlish secretary who lifts her skirt at his command: "You are an extremely salacious and corrupt Jezebel. Thank you.") A fallen sparrow out in the backyard, indoors a full storm. Hamilton's resemblance to Harriet Andersson adduces a note from Cries and Whispers, though the principal stylistic mainstay is Clayton's Our Mother's House. "Drop a bomb. Drop a bomb. Wipe us all out..." The demon's ditty is the author's parting jape, "Spread a Little Happiness." With Mary Macleod, Benjamin Whitrow, and Dudley Sutton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |