Eva

"Adam and Eve is the story, children, gather 'round..." Venice-Babylon, "film-festival time," the literary charlatan and the putain in the gondola, Joseph Losey's thoroughgoing statement on the artist's fall. The Welsh novelist (Stanley Baker) has usurped his brother's coal-mining memoirs, his bravado is a slight veneer, a jaundiced glance from the filmmaker adapting his opus (Giorgio Albertazzi) is enough to send him running. The cigarette-dangling concubine (Jeanne Moreau) loves money and hates men, listens to Billie Holiday and wields a mean bullwhip. She makes herself at home in his bathtub and rebuffs his advances with an ashtray, he's hooked. "Mean. Cruel. Vicious. Destructive." "Don't fall in love with me!" Not the Muse but a mirror of the writer's fears, the seductress invites him up to her boudoir only to slam the door in his face. (The overhead camera waits outside to hear her mocking laughter.) The consummation at the center has the couple tumbling behind pillows as a broiled crustacean fills the screen, the aftermath with aquarium in background gives way to the returning fiancée (Virna Lisi) with Eliot poetry in hand. The Waste Land of modernist glitter, then, Sternberg's Concha in the Europe of L'Avventura. Losey at his most extravagant savors the territory, tearing exuberantly through the languor while helping himself to Gianni Di Venanzo and Henri Decaë and Michel Legrand. With the lid blown off, his obsessions stream out voluminously, promiscuously: Statues and symbols surround the characters, the fractured mask worn by a nightclub performer reappears on the protagonist, drunk and sprawled on the marble floor for a crucified pose. Masaccio's garden revisited, Roeg's canals foreseen. "From milkless milk to silkless silk, we are growing used to soulless souls." The Servant takes up the circling pans, along with the S&M warfare. With James Villiers, Riccardo Garrone, and Checco Rissone. In black and white.