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In Search of Unicorns, an illustrated reading. Robert Altman pans down from tinkling wind chimes and zooms through a window to locate the authoress (Susannah York) in her den, quickly besieged by wandering, mocking voices. "A crossed line," perhaps, a fractured consciousness, definitely, the lush impression of being asleep in a car driving along a mountainside. Blocked chimneys and footsteps in the attic in the house in the woods, just the space for the men in her life to mingle. The husband (René Auberjonois) stays out late and likes dumb jokes, the French lover (Marcel Bozzuffi) died in a plane crash yet lingers still, they keep morphing into each other. "Two to tango" and three's a crowd, four and five with the lecherous neighbor (Hugh Millais) and the lass (Cathryn Harrison) who might be the heroine's young self. "Whatever it is, I'd like a steady diet of it." Red Desert, Secret Ceremony, Hour of the Wolf... Altman in full riddle mode abounds in mirrors and doppelgängers, complete with a soundtrack churning with fey voiceovers and dissonant Japanese percussion. The upside-down elk's head and the unfinished puzzle comprise the artistic mind come undone, or maybe just a typical stay in damp Dublin. Inner worlds, oneiric compositions (green field and brown leaves, flock of sheep and jagged cascade). The kitchen knife is put to use in a flash of Repulsion, the camera itself eventually takes a shotgun blast to the eyeball: "My my my. The ghost bleeds." Plenty of Hitchcock feints in the sonatina construction, "the pain of being without" is noted before das Ich is encountered and ran over (cf. Giulietta degli Spiriti). Munch for the punchline suspended between shower and waterfall—schizophrenic protagonist or mystifying auteur? "Oh, you just don't understand women." Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond.
--- Fernando F. Croce |