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Paradoxical bromides ("Nothing is what it seems," "Seeing is believing") mingled and transcended for Nicolas Roeg's kino-vision. (Asked if he believes in prophecies, the bishop posits a middle ground: "I do, but I wish I didn't have to." The sunny English garden darkens most lyrically in the opening, an almost subliminal shot of a blonde moppet sinking into the pond while indoors her father (Donald Sutherland), having just spilled water on screening slides, senses the horror. (Julie Christie as Mum is on the couch reading Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space.) The wintry, off-season Venice of peeling walls and sludgy canals is where the couple goes to work and grieve, "a city in aspic" splintered by mirrors and statues and shadows, a gnomish face always around the corner. A blind psychic (Hilary Mason) uses her direct line to the hereafter to comfort Christie, Sutherland on the other hand suppresses his own supernatural affinities, presumes to reverse the erosion of medieval churches, and pays dearly for his spiritual denial. "The deeper we cut, the more Byzantine it gets." Venice like Reed's Vienna (The Third Man) decomposing in the water, where ancient edifices, vertiginous memory and otherworldly realms jostle continually. (The editing of the sex scene, hopscotching between torsos intertwined in the sheets and post-coital bits of business, is very moving in its evocation of the transience of fleshly ecstasy next to the sinister weight of the centuries.) Du Maurier's story as a swank procession of uncanny set-pieces, with the color red materializing as Poe's Masque of Death, a Red Riding Hood figure scuttling in dark hallways, a blot spreading malevolently over a photograph. Thrown off-balance along with the audience, the protagonist survives dangling from a cathedral's scaffolding only to foresee his own funeral barge. Roeg at the height of his powers, the subtlest of all gialli, truly a film to heighten the senses. Cinematography by Anthony Richmond. With Clelia Matania, Massimo Serato, Renato Scarpa, and Leopoldo Trieste.
--- Fernando F. Croce |