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It begins where Le Mépris ends, as it were, and hinges on a gag from The Palm Beach Story ("You're standing on his face!"). Countryside manse at night, off-screen screech and crash, thus the accident that delivers the Austrian "princess" (Jacqueline Sassard) to the bed of the Oxford professor (Dirk Bogarde) and triggers the remembrance that is the film. A repressed figure with a doleful wife (Vivien Merchant) and a sporadic stutter, plus a rival in the "very versatile" colleague (Stanley Baker) who "suits the medium" of TV. The third player is the young upper-cruster (Michael York) engaged to the vapid beauty, last seen stepped on in the overturned auto. "All aristocrats were made to be..." "What?" "Killed." "Of course." Harold Pinter's clipped comedy of middle-aged desire and compromise, immaculately faceted by Joseph Losey like a hard, cold, purposely incomplete jewel. Literary hypotheticals on the sunny lawn, little hostilities that accumulate over the course of a placid Sunday capped by a venomous dinner. (The laddish blueblood can't keep up with his elders but gets his turn with a different kind of brutal ritual, "a murderous game" brawled on a checkerboard floor under a grand cupola.) Resnais is taken stock of, Delphine Seyrig and all, in the London encounter with the provost's daughter, contemplated through rain-speckled glass windows to the accompaniment of shards of flattened, disembodied dialogue. "It's a bizarre story. It'll amuse you," it goes unheard. The most virtuosic passage unfolds over the cooking of an omelette and the reading of a letter, an exquisitely sustained flow of nuances between Bogarde and Baker. "A process of enquiry only," philosophy defined, naturellement the Losey-Pinter cinema as well. A child's toy car is added to the closing tableau for the echo. Cinematography by Gerry Fisher. With Alexander Knox, Ann Firbank, Brian Phelan, Terence Rigby, and Freddie Jones.
--- Fernando F. Croce |