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Old and New Testament, Marienbad treatment. "After all, what's a man to do with his money?" Creation, tentacles in churning visions, the twitchy scion (Anthony Perkins) roused in a hotel room with bloodied hands and canted camera angles. Eden has been frozen in time ca. 1925, the paterfamilias (Orson Welles) presides pensively over the country mansion ("Eighty rooms and a secret passageway," plus a sloshed witch stashed away), his wife (Marlène Jobert) was scooped up as a child from the gardener's home. Into this steps the Ellery Queen investigator (Michel Piccoli), "the extraordinarily analytical brain" ultimately blinkered by pride. Incest, blackmail and thunderstruck death, disorder in the universe. Claude Chabrol the lapsed Catholic cleaning house, one demolished Commandment for each of the ten murky days. The bastard in the Garden, nuns on the train, the crucifix in the woods all figure in the atmosphere leaden with shame and guilt and needful blasphemy. "A life of intellectual austerity" not meant for the mediocre artist, who keeps in the basement a marble effigy of his father as Zeus, thunderbolt and all, in reference perhaps to the moneyed Neptune of Mr. Arkadin. (Welles' knowing solemnity is just the tenor for these rarefied corridors: "My poor friend, I'm afraid you'll find yourself in a kind of a... labyrinth.") The luxurious milieu reflected upside-down and distorted is a recurring image for the prison of aestheticism, the wrathful pickaxe can't come soon enough. Chabrol's most oneiric film prior to Alice ou la dernière fugue, in a style better appreciated by Clayton in The Great Gatsby. Lights on for the death of God and the close of the circle, no redemption or catharsis but for a fuller awareness of human depravity. With Guido Alberti and Tsilla Chelton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |