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The gag ("I must've taken a wrong turn") is Bugs Bunny's, shared with Antonioni's The Passenger. Istanbul, "not a real place, just a stage set for a love story." The French professor (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) incommunicado on the edge of the Bosphorus, the secretive beauty (Françoise Brion) possibly involved with malevolent conspiracies, qui sait? Locations and gestures repeated, the déjà vu of sightseeing strangers. "But... we've already met." The lingering Marienbad phantom in Alain Robbe-Grillet's dry comedy of obfuscation, also La Jalousie literalized with horizontal slats opening and closing across the screen. Woman and the Orient, clichéd exoticism challenged and expanded in the mental maze, with a kaleidoscopic form to match. "Turkish for tourists," you speak it or you don't. Seraglios and mosques and bazaars, spotlight on the odalisque. "Faux" is the byword, the ancient excavation site that might bring the couple closer à la Viaggio in Italia is denied, "it was dug last year." Slanted tombstones mark not a decaying graveyard but a conscious style, wandering headlights reveal the underworld gargoyle (Guido Celano) in the dark with tinted specs and Dobermans. A most attentive soundscape, already a Robbe-Grillet hallmark—chanting prayers, hammers on rocks, a cacophony of cicadas. Architecture of the battle of the sexes, a matter of arches and columns and flooded passageways, the co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma who can't get a kiss from his wife, "pas ici." Jump cuts on De Chirico views, a panning camera's trance effects. L'éternel féminin, sprawled in lingerie or mangled in a crash, cf. Losey's Accident. "Imagery that recurs like fetishes," the artist wouldn't want it any other way. Welles in The Immortal Story returns the compliment to Mr. Arkadin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |