|
|
| |
 |
| |
| Released: |
1973 |
| |
|
| Genre: |
HORROR
THRILLER
CONTROVERSIAL
|
| |
|
| Origin: |
GB/ Italy |
| |
|
| Length: |
110 |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
MIXED Reviews
|
|
|
| Begins brilliantly but loses its compulsive thread in a maze of gloomy canals. |
|
|
| (Photoplay) |
|
| This is the fanciest, most carefully assembled enigma yet put on the screen. Nicolas Roeg is a chillingly chic director; the picture is an example of high-fashion gothic sensibility. It seems to say what Joseph Losey never dared to but what the audience for Losey’s films was always responding to: that decay among the rich and beautiful is sexy. Venice, the labyrinthine city of pleasure, with its crumbling, leering gargoyles, is obscurely, fright- eningly sensual here, and an early sex sequence with Christie and Sutherland nude in bed, intercut with their post-coital mood as they dress to go out together, has an extraordinary erotic glitter. Dressing is splintered and sensualized, like fear and death. Using du Maurier as a base, Roeg comes closer to getting Borges on the screen than those who have tried it directly, but there’s a distasteful clamminess about the picture. Roeg’s style is in love with disintegration. |
|
| (Pauline Kael, New Yorker) |
|
|
|
|
. Julie Christie 