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"She'll turn your head, though she might use a judo pose..." The underworld Venus is a free agent, this time she's on the side of the British government on a case of oil and diamonds, at the top of the pop-art pileup is Monica Vitti not quite out of the Antonioni torpor. Fragmented derring-do plus fatuous repartee with the sidekick (Terence Stamp), introduced skewering a mannequin's torso as his faceless date scampers out the door. Dirk Bogarde as the fey criminal mastermind camps over his Mediterranean island, fussing over breakfast while his henchwoman (Rossella Falk) strangles a mime between her thighs. "I am the villain of the piece and I have to condemn you to death." "But I am the heroine. Don't I get away?" Joseph Losey contemplating the spy flick in the Sixties, "what to make of a diminished thing," he marshals all his talents and resources to curdle it as much as possible. The Eva mask is visible, the chase through the Amsterdam Doll House is gruesomely reworked in Barbarella. Espionage has often been a metaphor for the breakdown between the sexes, with Bondian faddishness there's only sex and death, purposely degraded with sour slapstick. "We've played the truth game. Now we're going to play consequences." Colored smoke, crying crustaceans, duets and oversized ice-cream cones and the Sheik's Cavalry charge. Pope's The Rape of the Lock and no mistake, Tosca on the poop deck. A comic-strip adventure inked in derision, a supremely humorless lark, Losey wouldn't want it any other way. "Can it be that this egg is fertilized?" Russell (Billion Dollar Brain) and Bava (Danger: Diabolik) have their own confections to poison. With Harry Andrews, Clive Revill, Alexander Knox, Michael Craig, Scilla Gabel, Joe Melia, and Tina Aumont.
--- Fernando F. Croce |