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Films

La Belle Dame sans Cenci

Michael Heath

"In Their construction Accident, Boom, and Secret Ceremony, an immaculate trilogy of introspection, resist almost tangibly the invasion of the critic, interpreter or commentator, turning him away with a reflective flawless surface—the archetypal Losey mirror," from Philip Strick's article on Losey, Spring Sight and Sound. Having always felt this to be the case—the role of critic and the works of Joseph Losey cannot compete either on a negative or sub/ objective basis—his films are always magnificent occasions, sharply observed, crystalline in their ornate stupendousness; a subneurotic dramatist he must be and as an over-60 director, with not too many films behind him even in the early witchhunting days of Hollywood, he exists now in a subdeceptive chasm, waylaying all individualism and coercing from his mind, thoughts and sights that beautify and sometimes console.

Amazing things occur in Secret Ceremony (Universal) that have never appeared in any of his films before. His wore with the Pinter/Williams-style of observation is now primitively exposed by a keenly munificent insight helped by a script by George Tabori (from a prize-winning story by an Argentinian civil servant Marco Denevi) containing a wealth of mad innuendos and inducing a somniferous precision.

Old friends have again rejoined the Losey crew: the magical opulence of Richard Macdonald's interiors; Gerald Fisher who operated on Modesty Blaise and was given full reign on Accident), lighting cameraman-superbe, and Richard Rodney Bennett who even wrote a score for him for Blind Date in 1959.

The small east include two hard-core Aunties, an absolute field day for Dame Peggy Ashcroft (barely recognisable) and dear Pamela Brown, who shuffle and swear around their over-laden junk shop.

A simple plot starting with a mistaken identity. Leonora, a prostitute (Elizabeth Taylor) is picked up in a bus by Cenci (Mia Farrow) who thinks she is her mother and drags her off to her magnificent house. Stepfather Albert (Robert Mitchum) former lover of the dead mother (he says he is a cybernetics professor!) arrives from the States to claim parental responsibility. His Humbert-like relationship with Cenci goes something like this, "Incest is a rather boring symptom of the private property syndrome," and delightfully describes fathers bashing into their daughters in the Australian outback whilst Cenci snips at the rubble on his chin with scissors.

She stages a post-rape violent display, knocking over furniture, ripping down curtains, slicing her finger to let blood fall on the sheets, smashing the portrait of "dear Gustav", her first father, and makes her eyes red.

Cenci's fantasy world takes full rein at a holiday resort, full of mock-pregnant entrances, harsh colour and strident organ muzak. Losey pulls out all his cerebral stops here. An elderly man with an electric-goiter machine surveys Leonora resplendant (like Mrs Goforth) in a restaurant, with his metallic voice, saying, "Yes, she is very beautiful". This sequence has superbly eerie colours, full of mists and sombre sunsets, seagulls and above all a near hysterically insane undertone.

Leonora and Albert among the dunes spit and fight ending in a facial wound for Albert. Because she is protecting Cenci from his advances, and he is oblivious of the staged rape, he retaliates by saying he wouldn't rape a randy elephant.

Cenci's baby is a pudgy cloth frog bent double. Leonora attacks her, distributing the child/feathers over the floor. Albert makes love to Cenci in the dull khaki-fog on the beach among chains looking like gigantic snails. Cenci in a bid to return to "normality", banishes Leonora from the old house and takes an overdose. Leonora over the coffin stabs Albert. She returns to the personal sanctity of her prostitution.

I then listened to the last Act of Berg's Wozzeck, the film has incredible affiliations to that.

Throughout the film there is an underlying Catholic-aura, of an sensitive religious trail. Re-occuring grave sequences (Leonora's drowned child resembles Cenci), Cenci's baby-God prayers, Leonora's moving contrition and confession, the crucifix on the wall, and especially in the opening sequence of the church, alone in a reclamation area, Leonora stooped in prayer, followed by Cenci and halted by a coughing priest administering, I was jolted by this all-inferring persistence of hope and salvation.

The evil of this horrid-tale lies in its precise understatement of sexual bewilderment. The haunting waif of Mia Farrow is one of Losey's most moving characters; there is in her performance a more brittle and testing observance of abnormality I have yet to see. Her bubbly laughter in moments of innocence (unprotected;) and especially in the strange quickness of her eyes—in one sequence she plays the piano one fingeredly (Bennett's recurring theme) framed by yellow wattle, her eyes and head jerk frighteningly in an epileptic spasm— relax throughout, her hair shortens (as in Rosemary's Baby) and in her last moments before death in the deserted house, she is very moving.

Elizabeth Taylor is a great snarling hulk of flesh, not quite up to her verbal spitting as in Boom! yet she rages and mimics with the charm of a pompous matron ("the duchess said it was raining like piss") but spoils many scenes, unfortunately, with not too adequate sensitivity.

You listen for the silences in a Losey film and you soak up the wonderfully ornate colours, especially the greens, the mellow and sultry hues of the house as the cameras prowl from room to room.

The soundtrack is of formidable origin— slamming doors (the film begins with one) chimes of clocks, music boxes, bells, l'oiseau-filligree twitterings, cars, jets and the waning (an ondes-martinot?) of Bennett's score.

Critics have not forgiven Losey for making Boom! (British writers at least enjoyed the splendid nonsense) but of the reviews of Secret Ceremony I have read, there has been deliberate dumbfounded and incredulity. Many people here have been wary of the film, not too sure of its implications (importance, then?), and somewhat embarrassed, somehow, Mia and Liz. It is not as if bad acting or the mere presence of "stupidity in the dialogue and hammed acting"(!) can mar a film, let alone anything as concentrated as this.

It is a difficult film in many ways but like the work of most of the elderly British directors (Clayton, pace, in particular) it is richly rewarding on repeated viewings. There is an unnecessary understatement (the continuing criticism of . . .) of the mice parable at the conclusion, but one could take it to mean far more than hapless rodentry!

Above all the film is operatic in style, grandiloquent in exercise and full of reverent restraint. Joseph Losey's films are events to welcome any time, and Secret Ceremony is his most enlightened yet.

Jacques Rivette's la Religieuse (The Nun) (N.Z.F.S.) is showing at the Lido at the moment and is a sombre-enough drama, well worth seeing (if my recommendation outright doesn't shock you too much!) just for its sublimal lead of the magnificent young French actress Anna Karina (who now, horrors, has learnt dubbo-engleese and has been slapped into much commercial junk.)

She is Suzanne Simonin, the bedevilled cloistered victim who is charred by the maladours of sanctity, satan and femine lust. Sounds exciting, all 2 hours 20 minutes of it.

It is a film of anguish, disillusionment, imprisonment, self-sacrifice, lesbian love, and is, after all that, completely compelling in an interestingly chilling sort of way.

Based on (from countless paeons back) Diderot's novel, Rivette's soundtrack achieves an almost rare stream of conscious flow with its electronic sounds (of France's Jean-Claude Eloy), exaggerated natural sounds, and various plunketry trivia by Pachelbel, Couperin, Rameau, etc.

Suzanne against her parent's wishes is thrust behind bars at Longehamp nunnery, with its endless corridors of pain, torture and temptation, gruelling asceticism—far more convincingly in the tormented episodes than The Devil and the Nun (Mother Joan of the Angels) a similar, if not altogether more cheaply religious, and less successful film tried to show.

She is sent to the Convent of Arpajon, and the film breathes (voila!)—in light, lace, flowers, laughter and a heap of libertine perversions—one the many reasons why Madame de Gaulle and the French State and Church banned the film in France for many years. Lisolette Pulver (who let it be known for the record played for Wilder in One Two Three!) is the raving coquettish Mother Sapphica Superior who seduces poor Suzane into the world of jealousies, silences, music lessons and near seduction. Suzanne appeals to outsiders, revokes the devil (the Mother), falls in love with a priest, runs away to an ironing parlour, joins the sedate ladies of passion and pleasure, and falls out a window, into blackness, to her prostrate spread-eagled-cross death.

The Vic Film Society showed a few years ago Rivette's Paris Nous Appartient: the critics hated it, very few understood it (because it was Pericles' revisited), I didn't. In Paris Rivette's latest L'Amour Fou is showing in the complete 4 hour 12 minutes version. It is centred around Racine's Andromaque. I suggest you need the play now.

[To J.McL., thank you for the kind words. Your answer to a prayer will be granted you very soon in a film called Helga. Salient requests reviews of this film to be printed in a sex hygiene article, entitled "John Charles Thomas, a young yak's guide to toilet training". Please limit your words to no more than 50. The judges decision will be final, and there will be no prize. Entries sent c/o Salient Office by July 5.]

Footrot: There has been no decision, yet, on Lindsay Anderson's If ...