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John Boorman gets the Lesteroid element out of his system in the opening credits, and goes his own modernist away. (Wintry streets and blank-walled offices, that's Swinging London here.) The allegory locates mod culture in a meat warehouse, where The Dave Clark Five are virtually indistinguishable from the "surrealist" carcasses hanging next to them. The kooky supermodel (Barbara Ferris) paints a mustache on her own billboard and absconds with the "saturnine" stuntman, all grist to the mill of the corporate puppeteer (David de Keyser) on their trail. The elusive escape from the pervasive grip of commercialism, a string of disillusioning interludes: A dilapidated countryside commune suddenly in the midst of a military blitzkrieg (filmed with a flash of Les Carabiniers), the costume ball tumbling into Royal Crescent's waters, a dude ranch erected on the Brontës' moors. When the whole world is a market, where can the products run off to? At the center is a snippy couple of middle-aged "collectors" (Robin Bailey and Yootha Joyce) to personify the lecherous Old Guard, skewered à la Losey but for a note of faded grace for the henpecked antiquarian with the scratchy phonograph. The "callous hopefulness" of youth versus the all-powerful advertisement agency—no contest, everything is already packaged and sticky with slogans. Boorman's camera bounces on trampolines, dives into swimming pools and swings from ropes, yet the forlorn mood continually underlines the limitations of faddish larkiness. (What starts out like A Hard Day's Night bloopers gradually morphs into an uncredited remake of Antonioni's L'Eclisse.) Winner's I'll Never Forget What's'isname is something of a sledgehammer relative, the heroine's dream of a secluded sanctuary for two becomes the tug-of-war island of Hell in the Pacific, naturally. With David Lodge, Clive Swift, and Ronald Lacey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |