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Radley Metzger in the Abruzzi Mountains, a gracefully ribald conductor recalling Buñuel's love of Sherlock Jr. The characters in search of an author are jaded aristocrats introduced commenting on the stag reel flickering before them, family night at the ancient castle. The American businessman (Frank Wolff) scoffs sardonically, the Italian wife (Erika Remberg) is paralyzed with ennui, the son (Paolo Turco) protests its crudeness, soon enough they're looking for another novelty. At the local carnival there's a tawny daredevil (Silvana Venturelli), could she be the same woman they just watched romping onscreen? Back in the castle the son dons top hat and cape for "the stage work before the lantern show," afterward the blue movie is run through the projector only to somehow reveal the action from a different angle, the leading lady's face now obscured. From person to person Venturelli goes, the blank object of desire turned active architect of desire. Wolff conquers his impotence with her on the library floor, the camera zooming in on magnified dictionary entries for "phallus" and "fuck" and "ecstasy." For Turco it's a mix of the sacred and the profane on open fields serenaded by faux-Morricone ululations, for Remberg it's the screening room at the end of a maze of dungeons, thawing by the visitor's side. "If we don't have the vitamins... there's always the fantasy." A collection of sensations rewound and reshuffled, Metzger's witty softcore arabesque stands alongside Losey's Secret Ceremony and Rohmer's La Collectionneuse and Robbe-Grillet's L'Éden et après. Eros and Pirandello, the gallery of watchers being watched opens in the dark and closes in the dark, "in between it's just a game of hide and seek."
--- Fernando F. Croce |