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The comedy of faith in family and ritual. Polanski is concurrent with What?, the maiden from London (Christina von Blanc) arrives at the chateau for the reading of the will. From the beginning "un rêve étrange," vultures viewed from a limousine, Uncle (Howard Vernon) at the piano not with the Marche funèbre but a jaunty waltz. The wake has the corpse sitting up with open eyes raised heavenward, sacramental gibberish fills the air courtesy of the half-clad hedonist (Carmen Yazalde) busy painting her toes. The blind lass (Linda Hastreiter) has an oracular bent ("I can see the color of your soul"), Auntie (Rosa Palomar) ponders the bejeweled rings on a severed hand. "What is this world of shadows and silence?" Jesús Franco's Die Braut von Korinth, or at least his You Can't Take It With You, with the filmmaker jumping in as a cretinous servant arguing with a chicken's hacked-off noggin. Black bats on white linen, a chapel in the woods, "closed, otherwise I'd be inside." Papa (Paul Müller) materializes with a noose around his neck, his warnings are cut off as his chair is dragged off into darkness by a poetic Reaper (Anne Libert). The grinning voyeur is later an overjoyed doctor wielding thermometer and syringe, Jean Rollin's alternate footage has a gaggle of pasty ghouls breaking through a carpet of leaves. "You shattered the big ebony Phallus! Poor soul! Now misery is your lot!" An imagistic flow, a rubato tempo, all liminal spaces (dream and reality, sanity and madness, life and death). The finale is indicative of Franco's cinema, brave the swamp and find water lilies. Robbe-Grillet and Chabrol offer versions of their own, Glissements progressifs du plaisir and Alice, ou la dernière fugue.
--- Fernando F. Croce |