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"The main thing is the optical effect," a lenticular portrait of despots handily covers the crack on the classroom wall. Walerian Borowczyk's basic image has a pair of dolts pushing each other against a concrete wall, a flattened perspective adorned with ravishingly soiled bric-à-brac (a glass cabinet in the back of the school holds a pistol and a dummy's painted noggin). The island takes its name from its aging ruler (Pierre Brasseur), a squashed satyr decked out in generalissimo uniform who holds gladiatorial bouts to decide the fate of his prisoners. His wife (Ligia Branice) is a sad swan rolling in the hay with the young lieutenant (Jean-Pierre Andréani) and gazing at the distant horizon. The ocean may promise new things ("Not better, just different"), but it's also where corpses are dumped because "salt devours everything." The hulking bully is cut down to size, the cunning little thief (Guy Saint-Jean) is pardoned and becomes the dictator's boot-polisher and kennel-keeper, he swiftly makes his way up the pecking order. Kafka and Ionesco for the comic tone, "no air or light," a universe boiled down to crawling desire and neurosis. Not the desolate Laurel and Hardy of Polanski's early shorts but a perversion of Chaplin, insects amid binoculars and galloping horses. The gun meant to slay the queen instead usurps the throne—when the trappings of ambition and the release of lust cancel each other out, is it any wonder that the world looks like a ramshackle penal colony and sounds like an organ grinder's version of Handel? Degas nudes and the color of meat, "don't compare me to a fly" (Herzog's Signs of Life). Borowczyk seeks transcendence in grime and finds it, a grain of Ordet follows the plunge. With Ginette Leclerc, Fernand Bercher, and René Dary. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |