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The abstract and the visceral melded across a suffocating widescreen, the Joseph Losey test par excellence. "Did you think this was going to be a Boy Scout picnic?" The chase in media res, fugitives (Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell) in the wilderness with wrists bound behind their backs, the more vague the better. The older fellow has bursts of barking bravado and maniacal glee, his reluctant partner is more vulnerable and young enough to be his son. (A rare bonding moment finds them in simultaneous fits of diarrhea after sampling questionable condensed milk.) Their nemesis is a marauding helicopter savoring the hunt, bringing its whirring blades close to its prey only to back away and vanish again. "I'll bury that bastard pilot yet." Boorman's Hell in the Pacific is a close precedent, the distillate of resistance and survival receives Losey's virtuosic treatment. The two men sneak into a village in search of supplies, a razor swiped from a corpse gets no reaction from a petrified guardian but a pilfered loaf of bread snaps the crone to screaming life. A Cézanne view of rock and verdure, "too open," suddenly it's dotted with soldiers sporting alien goggles. (Terrain is sometimes Latin American, sometimes Southeast Asian, sometimes lunar.) Allegorical crevasses, splenetic metaphysics. "He should have taken your head off and put it in a bucket of vinegar and sent it to a museum!" Fire from above in the cornfield, snakes down in the mud, bitter remembrances under the rain. The machinery of metaphor and the machinery of cinema together in the infernal whirlybird, the ruthless camera's eye devouring space and shaving meaning. The grand Borgesian vision builds to snowy summits, the punchline is that sometimes you cannot rise above your foes. "Why don't we just dig ourselves a couple of graves and go to sleep?" Skolimowski picks up the strand of thought in Essential Killing. Cinematography by Henri Alekan, Guy Tabary, and Peter Suschitzky.
--- Fernando F. Croce |