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Cat Stevens' "But I Might Die Tonight" set the timbre, Jerzy Skolimowski on the enigma of adolescence. The 15-year-old mop-top (John Moulder-Brown) has his first job at the seedy bathhouse, on his first day he's already a masturbatory accessory for an amorous gorgon (Diana Dors, indelibly inflaming herself with sports metaphors: "Tackle, tackle, dribble, dribble, shoot..."). The teasing co-worker (Jane Asher) is the lad's object of desire, letting him cop a feel in the dark of a theater before turning around with a slap. "I love her," trumpets the "perverted little monster," the crush turns psychotic: Squirming with frustration as his she steps out on a date, he bounces between a strip joint and a hot-dog stand and lands in the makeshift boudoir of a prostitute (Louise Martini), one leg in nylon stocking and the other in plaster cast. "Don't believe everything you read, as the teacher said." Browning's "Cristina" balefully revised, or rather the callow romanticism of Skolimowski's Innocent Sorcerers screenplay replaced by pubescent clamminess. A London of the mind (much of it filmed in Munich), with a tangible foretaste of Suspiria's ballet mausoleum in the hormonal reds and chlorine greens of its corridors and peepholes. Hyperactive scenes fractured with a handheld camera, all the better to set off curious compositions (i.e., Moulder-Brown and Asher having a bite on the trampoline in the foreground while in the undulating background a kayaking bloke zigzags and capsizes). "Nice weather for ducks, isn't it?" Cardboard cutouts and "burst pipes" plus a prankish pitch of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, leading to the bottom of an empty pool—the boy's idealization of the girl collides with her complicated reality, a bloody deluge washes it away. One year before Harold and Maude and Summer of '42, a keen critique. With Karl Michael Vogler, Christopher Sandford, Erica Beer, Anita Lochner, and Burt Kwouk.
--- Fernando F. Croce |