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Masculin Féminin via Mack Sennett, "an exaggeration, that's all." The Felliniesque vision of the opening credits (line after line of sweater-clad fembots abstracted by David Watkin's corkscrewing camera) lays out London's mod harem, the black-suited pasha (Ray Brooks) has the knack of seduction, his geeky flatmate (Michael Crawford) wants it. The catalyst is the provincial jolie laide (Rita Tushingham) wedged between the chaste nebbish and Mister Tight Trousers, a sort of leprechauny Jean-Pierre Léaud (Donal Donnelly) completes the Pinter-like, Pinter-lite quadrille. "Weren't all of us, more or less, sexual failures?" Ann Jellicoe's play situates the desire and power plays in a blanched room, too much of a proscenium for Richard Lester's skittering jeux de cinéma: Superimposed titles, jump-cuts, slow-motion, freeze-frames, gratuitous fumbling with bathtubs and water skis. Keaton's brass bed (Go West) out of the junkyard, wheeled, rowed, turned into a trampoline. Middle-aged passersby comprise the Old Guard, given to disembodied grouchiness and puns. "She'll regret she didn't wear a safety device ... I'm used to innuendo ... There's no national heritage anymore ... Kip, milk, and biscuits, and you wonder why they're screaming out for roughage." The Swinging whirl, shot like a beehive and paced like a carousel, mumsy-whimsy for days. Hide and seek with birds and motorcycles, the leonine noise game with whip and scratch taken up in Anderson's If.... Partie de campagne at the park, the heroine follows it up with a litany that rings every possible inflection of "rape," the only word that rattles tomcat hegemony. Jazzy impudence and fogey complacency ultimately like two sides of the faddish coin, "a real steadying influence" turns out to be the trajectory from A Look Back in Anger to What's New Pussycat? In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |