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The hunter without prey and the tournament without prize, Robert Altman in wintry Quebec sorts it out. The new Ice Age makes for a gelid void, "nothing but water," the dots in the white canvas are either hounds feasting on cadavers or intrepid fools trudging in limbo. Survivors in the makeshift city dress like Eskimos at the Renaissance Fair, in walk the trapper (Paul Newman) and her thumb-sucking bride (Brigitte Fossey). (Her pregnant belly is pawed in awe, "the last one born, the end of the line.") Not much to do after the apocalypse but play the eponymous malefic backgammon, death and revenge bring the protagonist to the casino and into an ongoing match. Lists, codes, rituals, "the killing order" for the motley crew of competitors, a roll of the dice and a spear through the neck. "There's nothing left but the game." Altman's revision of California Split as a metaphysical cryptogram, as disagreeable and dissonant as it needs to be. The star player (Vittorio Gassman) fancies himself an apostle, in the charity den he thunders about the geometry of the universe and the stages of life and "the awareness of nothingness." "Too serious," quips the adjudicator (Fernando Rey) who surveys the clashes with a Mephistophelian smile. The fateful board from The Seventh Seal is writ large, and there's Bibi Andersson herself with the cherished dream smile from Wild Strawberries before the procession of slashed throats. Memory and survival boiled down to one-upmanship in the tundra, a lost culture preserved in glass tablets, Baudelaire's albatross is a goose heading north. "Hope is an obsolete word. I demand a judgment." Through a frosted lens it opens and closes, the loser-hero venturing into the wilderness like the auteur into the new decade. Cinematography by Jean Boffety. With Nina van Pallandt, Craig Richard Nelson, David Langton, and Thomas Hill,.
--- Fernando F. Croce |