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A little joke on the play's claustrophobic nature kicks things off, the chariot's stop at the echoing valley is shot on location with vast vistas. The widowed Queen (Edwige Feuillère) has worn a veil ever since her husband's demise, "the only thing I have ever been afraid of is silence," thus Jean Cocteau's transposition of the Mayerling affair. The grand ball swirls downstairs, up in the locked room she holds a candelabra to illuminate the private shrine in a leftover bit of La Belle et la Bête incantation. Out of the thunderstorm bursts the King's doppelgänger, the poet-anarchist and would-be assassin (Jean Marais), swiftly recognized as a lethal angel. Absorbing Your Majesty's prolix torrents, he finds his footing in their pas de deux. "If you spare me, I won't spare you." Eros and Thanatos (and cinema and theater) like the title's avian coat of arms, destroy one and the other follows. (The distance between human beings, sighs the killer, "nothing sadder in the world.") The cosmos inside a chamber, or at least a miniature model of the town, the Queen uses the clock tower for target practice. The lectrice (Silvia Monfort) is a pawn of the Archduchess, the scheming Count (Jacques Varennes) huddles in a treehouse. An ornate welter of one-way mirrors, staircases and trapezes, where bloodied hands are washed in a champagne bucket and there's "a wind of upheaval" blowing continually. (Lubitsch and Preminger's A Royal Scandal is a model of composition.) "A curious mix of death and beauty," Cocteau wouldn't have it any other way. Antonioni's experiment in Il Mistero di Oberwald adds color and video. With Jean Debucourt, Ahmed Abdallah, Yvonne de Bray, and Gilles Quéant. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |