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Half mystical road movie, half ethnographic study, the counterculture's trek back to the Garden. Rare plumage in the wilderness (cf. Ray's Wind Across the Everglades), an amusement for the bourgeois blonde (Bulle Ogier) in New Guinea, the diplomat's wife with a boutique back in Paris. From one fad to another, the search for the off-limits valley whose heavy mists have kept it a blank space on maps, "l'inconnu. "I thought there were no lands left to explore nowadays." Tagging along with the longhair expedition (led by Jean-Pierre Kalfon) by jeep and horse and on foot, she comes for the feathers and stays for the enlightenment. Tourists who fancy themselves truth-seekers or vice versa, thus "the decadent West" deep in the bush. Shamanic masks and "liquor of Dionysus" along the way, the heroine gulps down an extra dose and gets acquainted with Nature by curling into a tree's massive roots and draping a green serpent around her neck. Pious hippies, surly poachers, free love resisted and embraced. No Herzog or Roeg madness for Barbet Schroeder, just a detached camera and a saturnine skepticism about fuzzy Europeans seeking the paradise "with many exits and but no way in." Recording a tribe's preparations for a ceremonial banquet or contemplating their elaborate face-painting patterns, Schroeder's coolly engrossed eye gazes ahead to his documentaries on barbarous dictators and talking gorillas. (His stand-in in the journey is probably Michael Gothard's rangy, sardonic mechanic, who listens to Ogier's going-native enthusiasm and promptly pours a bucket of cold water.) "C'est fini vacances!" Wind and clouds and Pink Floyd spaciness comprise the Lost Horizon adjustment at the close, the bloody ripostes by Lenzi and Deodato come in due time. Cinematography by Néstor Almendros. With Valérie Lagrange, Miquette Giraudy, and Jérome Beauvarlet.
--- Fernando F. Croce |