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It swims upstream, with plenty of lures on hooks along the way. (The joke is clinched early on, the young heroine at the fishing farm squeezes milt from a caught specimen and tosses it aside.) The impossible object of desire, from provincial tease to international businesswoman, thus Isabelle Huppert with "peut-être" up front and "jamais" in the back, cf. Minnelli's Gigi. No use for "a sense of sin," she hustles the visiting swells at the bowling alley and hops a plane to Tokyo with the jet-setting playboy (Daniel Olbrychski). Nude yet untouchable, so learn the ruined entrepreneur (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and the tricked lecher (Jean-Paul Roussillon). "The closer I am to death, the more I love life," says the ailing Japanese magnate (Isao Yamagata). No such serenity for Joseph Losey, whose view of human relationships is as brackish as ever—his mise en scène is a series of aquariums, a sinuous camera charting dispassionate power plays in bourgeois haunts and disco nightclubs. Heterosexuality and homosexuality no longer mean anything, declares the spurned lioness (Jeanne Moreau), "you're either sexual or you're not," the seasoned gold-digger (Alexis Smith) meanwhile basks in the memory of some 33,000 encounters. (The casting of the leading ladies of Eva and The Sleeping Tiger is key to the accumulation of Losey themes.) A haiku for the child who hated growing up, faithful only to her nihilism and her husband (Jacques Spiesser), "a queer who can't face it." Dour adjustments of Time Without Pity and Accident, even Don Giovanni is noted. "You repeat yourself, or you contradict yourself." The ending mirrors the opening, still stumped by the blank who with a shrug joins the system she set out to destroy. With Lisette Malidor, Roland Bertin, and Craig Stevens.
--- Fernando F. Croce |