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Radley Metzger certainly knows his art-house models, he opens with a Godardian clapboard on Fellinesque Roman steps and borrows one of Demy's dreamers. (Malle's Les Amants comes into play as well, the camera repeatedly shifts focus between the heroine's flushed visage in the background and a bouquet of white camellias in the foreground, a literally pulsing composition.) "Don't you ever come down?" "Not if I can help it." The socialite (Danièle Gaubert) gulps down pills while racing a white convertible, the languid center of a decadent whirl, her "special sickness" is the kind she shoots into her veins. The earnest admirer (Nino Castelnuovo) is rather lost at the jet-set orgy, their tryst takes place in a mirrored boudoir for a polyvalent effect across the 'Scope widescreen. His offer of love is countered by her metaphor for ephemeral fizziness, a champagne bubble that inevitably pops. "There is only now." The goal is to recapitulate Cukor's classic but in Cukor's lush later style, Bhowani Junction or The Chapman Report, say. The refuge from endless zonked-out revelries is a little Mediterranean idyll, the outside world intrudes in the form of the lad's father (Massimo Serato) as a courtly reminder of social mores trumping sensual ideals. Vulnerable emotions amid futuristic furniture and lounge music, cruelties and agonies at the casino, a jail-themed soirée equipped with manacles and leashes and barred rooms for vacant romping. Metzger saves the tragic irony for the finale, the demimonde's glossy surfaces become the plastic sheets separating the lovers at the hospital. "You must try to love me a little less and understand me a little better." With Eleonora Rossi Drago, Roberto Bisacco, Silvana Venturelli, Peter Chatel, and Philippe Forquet.
--- Fernando F. Croce |