|
Two mice in a tub of milk comprise the fairy tale's punchline, Joseph Losey's rich setup is a Byzantine labyrinth. The old cathedral amid new buildings (an Antonioni view from a moving double-decker), the prostitute (Elizabeth Taylor) with a drowned child and the heiress (Mia Farrow) with a lost mother, competing voids that engulf each other. Madness and role-playing as offshoots of alienation, a crumbling mansion makes for a proper stage. Music boxes galore, a fur coat, a hearty breakfast, a shared bath, "a great big bed with all the people one loves in it." "When you're older, you'll appreciate the advantages of sleeping alone." A parallel work to Boom and a similar trapdoor for camp cultists, its perverse amusements part of a rigorous system laid out like stained glass. Taylor turns out to be a melancholy wanderer and Farrow a depraved pixie, Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown materialize like Tweedledee and Tweedledum as kleptomaniac oddballs. The lecherous stepfather is seen first as a Cézanne portrait ("just a nice old man who forgot to shave") and then as Robert Mitchum, a marvelously Nabokovian turn and a telling link to Angel Face. London dreams, as ancient as Shelley, plaster for the antique shop but no marble for the cemetery. Belle de Jour, "the scent of children's sickrooms" (Truffaut on Les Enfants Terribles), Les Biches. The "rather boring symptom of the private property system" that is incest, the song of trauma ("Oh that I were, where would I be...") from whistle to piano tune to silent wail. An Argentinean parable adapted by a Hungarian and directed by an American in Europe, just the discombobulated effect sought by Losey. "Still, sometimes one has to choose between good taste and being a human being." Altman in That Cold Day in the Park and Images is the main inheritor. Cinematography by Gerry Fisher.
--- Fernando F. Croce |