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The clinical whites of a morgue yield to a nightclub's psychedelia, Swinging London back through the Italianate prism. A noir setup, a blonde and a corpse in a shadowy office, she's described as "so beautiful she's frightening" though the teenaged Ewa Aulin is more of a fuzzy cupcake. "Il franchese" (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is on the case, a descendant of Napoleon and an actor playing an actor playing a gumshoe. The whirl of blackmail and kidnapping naturally calls for a gun, "I took it just to complicate the plot." The feint is on Blowup, Godard's Made in USA is strip-mined and Russell's Billion Dollar Brain is concurrent, a rather pleasingly gratuitous Tinto Brass grab-bag. Flickering signs and comic-strip panels are the punctuation of the realm, quotations run the gamut from Lao Tzu to Alfred E. Neuman. A trenchcoated dwarf emerges from a Jubilee Kiosk to abduct the dazed cutie, a gangland Oliver Hardy tortures the hero by playing he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not with his eyebrow hairs. "Porca vacca!" The Antonioni studio is merely a backdrop for Aulin's striptease in silhouette, Trintignant reenacts the drum solo from Phantom Lady and smashes through the screen, Tarzan yell and all. Behind all the kaleidoscopic split-screens and stuttering montages is a frisky snapshot of the time and place—protests glimpsed at Piccadilly Circus, "Vietnam Is a Bad Trip" flashing in the middle of an underground happening, passersby shoved during a chase through Holborn station. Pop-art canvas or postmodern landfill? "There's enough mystery in the universe." The coda is unaccountably anticipatory of Last Tango in Paris. With Vira Silenti, Roberto Bisacco, Charles Kohler, and Luigi Bellini.
--- Fernando F. Croce |