Though it always boasted all the visual splendor of a Land of the Lost episode, video was in its infancy enough of a technical novelty to entice several major film artists to give it a twirl: thus Tati with Parade, Godard with Numéro Deux, and Antonioni with The Mystery of Oberwald. Adapting Jean Cocteau's play L'Aigle à Deux Têtes (of which Cocteau himself directed a film version in 1948), Antonioni reteams with morose muse Monica Vitti, foregrounds grain and crayons in some filters, vainly trying to unearth new technical expression. Vitti plays the grieving queen who, tired of wandering corridors and toasting the late king's portrait, hooks up with the rebellious young poet (Franco Branciaroli) infiltrating the castle to do her in. Passionate galloping, vials of poison and tell-tale thunderclaps follow, but the conflict rests less in the plot's l'amour fou than in the director's wrangling with video's inevitable flattening of space. Antonioni's undisguised disinterest in the play's hothouse theatrics frees him to futz around with such dated tics as ghostly superimpositions, hazy layering and, especially, associative color schemes -- a bouquet of flowers bleached crimson, a shaft of blue light spotlighting the slumbering queen, an evil character dragging a purple cloud with him around a chamber. After the crystallization of the culminating camera movement in The Passenger, this is just dicking around. Adaptation by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra. Cinematography by Luciano Tovoli.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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