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Lubitsch's That Uncertain Feeling is the point of departure, whipped up into a glittering maelstrom by a cinéaste high on pop Jung. "Una bella donnina di casa," wide-eyed and thin-lipped, Giulietta Masina by any other name. The husband (Mario Pisu) is a philandering PR man, the household is a labyrinth of sterile corners and TV screens. "The ether is full of voices," séances and dreams and memories besiege the pixie-frump, the doors of perception slam open. Chatty confidante (Valentina Cortese), mother the embalmed queen (Caterina Boratto), absconding grandfather (Lou Gilbert). "Flowers are grateful when loved," a come-on from the bullfighter (José Luis de Vilallonga) prophesied by the spastic oracle (Valeska Gert). Above all, the sensualist next door (Sandra Milo), whose continuous orgy includes a treehouse with a mechanized hoist for random boys. "Create your inner void," thus Federico Fellini's hallucinatory sendup of the whole arena of thought camouflaged as a curdled valentine to his wife. The social whirl, its fads and ninnies, piled high with floppy hats and veils and boas in gaudy Technicolor drifts. Extramarital investigators who quote Saint Augustine, "our zoom lenses make ideas like intimacy and secrecy obsolete." Childhood remembered is a circus when it's not a Catholic school pageant, creeping nuns around the tiny martyr consumed by papier-mâché flames, such creatures pierce the mind just as the heroine is about to give herself to a moist-eyed junior pasha. "A new game, the psychodrama!" Milo as Mae West, sangria for what ails you, "the cacodemons of carnal pain" and their wagging tongues. The Wizard of Oz and Now, Voyager are visible amid the clutter, towering pine trees await outside—emancipation or desertion? Bergman in Autumn Sonata has his own displaced therapy to conduct. Cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo. With Sylva Koscina, Friedrich von Ledebur, Luisa Della Noce, Silvana Jachino and Milena Vukotić.
--- Fernando F. Croce |