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The titular truth game has words instead of bullets, just a bit of cruel divertissement to liven up an awkward party. "Have you ever been in hell?" "Yes." A weekend in the country, as the tune goes, not Bergman's smiling estate but a forbidding castle, the perfect place for a child's vengeance. Munich businessman (Alexander Allerson) and wife (Margit Carstensen), each with a lover on the side (Anna Karina, Ulli Lommel). The housekeeper (Brigitte Mira) and her hulking son, a writer of "heady prose" (Volker Spengler). The couple's daughter (Andrea Schober) brings them all together, joining the confrontation with clanking crutches and trunkload of dolls and mute governess (Macha Méril). A feast for the voyeuristic camera, circling glittering compartments and peering into keyholes. "Eavesdroppers often hear the false truth." Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Exterminating Angel, or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by way of Marienbad. Endless corridors and cavernous chambers for the quadrille to rattle inside, for the weapon of malice and the echo of uncomfortable laughter. Madam in hairnet and stockings glares at the manipulative brat, a chess match between men goes nowhere fast, "we're both playing equally badly." The satirical bent inclines toward Chabrol, bête noire and frère de sang of the filmmaker (vide "Insects in a Glass Cage," an accompanying essay). The dolly-zoom quicksand of a suffocating dinner composition, cp. Losey's Secret Ceremony, "I was reading Rimbaud..." Mirrors, liquidations, rearrangements. Divide and conquer for the climactic game's questions, for each character a chance of metamorphosis ("A coin with a hole in the middle... A face made up of marble and alabaster... A worm-eaten apple"). The cream of the jest is that the destructive session becomes group therapy, complete with marital vows superimposed over the bourgeois void. Cinematography by Michael Ballhaus.
--- Fernando F. Croce |