|
Swirling night lights in the Champs-Élysées, flashing sci-fi colors for the opening credits, and, just as you're getting the hang of the bariolage of Claude Chabrol's artifice, a miniature documentary on a centuries-old vineyard. "Traditional methods," modernist investigation. The traumatized champagne scion (Maurice Ronet) fresh out of the sanitarium, "somewhat given to fantasies," hounded by American industrialists for the family name. The company is run by the socialite (Yvonne Furneaux) married to his colleague (Anthony Perkins), a twitchy former gigolo nautically inclined. (Model ships rather than stuffed birds adorn Norman Bates' walls here.) Moneyed idlers in private worlds, destroying the television set during dinner, capping a tedious soiree by ejaculating an oversized bottle all over the guests. "Doing nothing is a very tough job. It calls for a lot of concentration." Virtually a remake of À Double Tour, a sort of second first film right on the cusp of Chabrol's richest period. Uncanny 'Scope spaces, Hamburg nightclubs with rotating stages and Parisian studios littered with slats and murals, ornate mazes and scenes of crimes. The fraulein for rental (Christa Lang) and the modish sculptress (Suzanne Lloyd), a black stocking around their necks. "You know, when I like someone, I'm a monster. And my instinct is to devour." Joycean rhymes of names, flickers of shock therapy, a dollop of Henry Jones mugging. Mousy secretary into chic strangler, Stéphane Audran enacts the metamorphosis out of Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution. The finale's horrible limbo is a triangle trapped in a box, the overhead view of writhing figures zooms back into oblivion (cf. Aldrich's The Big Knife). With George Skaff, Annie Vidal, Catherine Sola, and Marie-Ange Aniès.
--- Fernando F. Croce |