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Film your notebook, says Welles, thus Jesús Franco's braiding of scraps from unfinished projects into a humid fugue. A killing by spear is the recurring dream, the stripper (Diana Lorys) awakens with bloody hands. Her lover (Colette Jack) alternates between tenderness and cruelty, they met at a Croatian cabaret where their locked gazes embody "pleasure, yes, but intense, almost as discomforting as a disease." (The "lascivious gestures and eccentric pauses" of the number with feather boa and green mannequin are indicative of the film's rubato rhythms.) A doctor (Paul Müller) comes to treat the oneiric affliction, a couple (Soledad Miranda, Andrea Montchal) peep from next door. "Then came the silent flight of heavy birds." Jewel thieves and mesmeric manipulation, a narrative sliver ditched by Franco in favor of smoke-like mental states, an immersion of intuitive textures. A camera roving in and out of focus over swathes of skin, the heroine behind a reflecting windshield as if in some parallel realm. "Suddenly it seems like everything has another proportion, another dimension." Duchamp's Étant donnés, variously, Jack in staring close-up might be Picasso's woman in a hat. The doomed beau (Jack Taylor) waxes poetic in the flickering gloom, an incantation of escape and sun and cinema. "Eddy Duchin plays the piano. He looks like Tyrone Power." The man of science in church and the somnambulist's existential wish, the Ineffable sorrow of Lorys wrapping herself in a sari before a mirror, the beatification of the "schizoid pervert who became a murderer." A missing link from Bergman's Persona to Lynch's Mulholland Drive and no mistake.
--- Fernando F. Croce |