Art Garfunkel smoking yet another fag. He’s a Shrink. Falls into an obssessive possessive erotic relationship with Theresa Russell. As if we hadn’t got enough Americans in Vienna, along comes Harvey Keitel as a long haired Viennese cop (but just doing a Harvey Keitel impersonation) to investigate what the hells been going on.
Turns out not alot has been going on really. But Nicolas Roeg’s direction invests the going on with all sorts of conundrumy complexy subplots, side-plots, no-plots.
The story is jigsawed up into disparate bits; our job (and believe me it does feel like “work”) is to puzzle the pieces of narrative back into some kind of meaningful sense.
Garfunkel and Russell are hopeless in the lead roles; he’s meant to be a deeply thinking Doctor of Analysis; she’s meant to be alluringly attractively troubled. But their “fatal attraction” to and for one another is fatuous. Perhaps its because Art Garfunkel can’t act; he does baby-faced opaqueness and thats about it. Russell comes across as a brazen hussied blank.The intensely torrid relationship they’re supposed to be having is convolutedly annodyne, interior-lite.
Theres some skinny shagging between them. Russell has a couple of tantrums. Art carries on his baby-faced smoking. (what a high forehead he had; he must have gone bald soon after this)
The film technique is all too conspicuously present; lots of cutaways and zoom-ins (on random objects in the frame. why?) The non-linear narrative splits and splices the chronology in every direction; cutting and pasting and juxtaposing to make the story seem obliquely complex.
I just got irritated by it. The film is phony as fuck.
And its dull.
In fact i was already binning the film, having seen – and been unimpressed by – a bit of it i’d seen previously . Then i remembered Keith Jarretts Koln Concert had been used in it. I suppose to add in intensity.
But the film has no internal intensity, no real resonance.
There’s no way i’ll be associating the Koln Concert with this pile of pretentious poo.
Dir: Nicolas Roeg, England/USA
4/10
