|
The haunted hotel, the end of the affair. Le temps d'un retour, as Resnais would have it, is a decade or so after the war in a Vienna mausoleum, where the concierge (Dirk Bogarde) tends to contessas and gigolos and addicts. Once upon a time he donned Nazi regalia to collect "sensational photographic studies," with camera in hand he singled out a lithe lass (Charlotte Rampling) amid horrified prisoners. Presently she's married to a symphony conductor while he hopes "to live in peace, like a church mouse," the reunion uncorks suppressed disgust and desire. A danse macabre on the order of Bertolucci (Il Conformista for the first two thirds, Last Tango in Paris for the rest), with remembrance and reverie braided by Liliana Cavani into quite the queasy sado-ménage. Performance and rape, audiences and witnesses: Mozart's Die Zauberflöte unfolds opulently on stage, but the characters in their seats can't help thinking of the past's sickly-green bondage. (The victim's survival depends on her effectiveness as a cabaret siren, her abuser can barely contain his giddiness as he adds Salome to the dirge with a grisly capper.) Lang's Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse figures in the setting, and there's the old SS cohort with monocle and dictum: "Memory is not made of shadows, but of eyes which can stare and fingers which point at you." Mock-trials like parodies of group therapy (all the talk of healing can't cloak a Sieg Heil as compulsive as Dr. Strangelove's), the barricaded and starving couple at the mercy of putrescent passion, "there's no cure." Bullets from the heartbroken queer, old guises for the last sunrise. The responses are by Pasolini (Salò) and Polanski (Death and the Maiden). With Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Isa Miranda, Giuseppe Addobbati, and Amedeo Amodio.
--- Fernando F. Croce |