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Jaunt of the mind, une anglaise et le continent. The title promises nocturnal mystification yet the fable opens at the crack of dawn, on a road when grass and asphalt appear inseparable from the earth. Hurtling headlights and squashed badger, a distant rumble revealed not as thunder but the literal war of the sexes. Fusillades and gas masks have the heroine (Cathryn Harrison) on the run, though, burgeoning virginal consciousness that she is, there's time for contemplating the creepy-crawlies in bucolic fields. At the country manor, the bedridden matriarch (Thérèse Giehse) talks with dear Humphrey the Rat, is asphyxiated by alarm clocks and revived with mirror and breastfeeding. "Very curious, if you ask me." Louis Malle's reveries transposed to the screen, just an overcast day with an Alice who might be Zazie in a hormonal marsh. Wailing posies, oversized glasses of milk, carefree children and critters. (A serenely cracked soundtrack is at the service of the menagerie, brimming with gobbledygook, radio chatter, squeaks, bleats, oinks, neighs and hisses.) Between Altman (Images) and Kurosawa (Dreams), the peevish, pot-bellied unicorn quoting Macbeth. Brother (Joe Dallesandro) and sister (Alexandra Stewart) like matching Janus profiles of sleek androgyny, a peewee rendition of a Tristan und Isolde aria segues into a deflowering image with saber and eagle. So it goes from symbol to symbol, prettily but vacantly—Joyce Buñuel's name is in the credits yet Don Luis' instinctual ferocity eludes Malle, a mellow bourgeois arranging his visions in a tasteful imitation of surrealism. Still, "the most beautiful things in the world are useless," like Harrison in close-up ("Beautiful delusion. Sweet awaked desire. Never waking, never fearing"), her lips not quite matching the words. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist.
--- Fernando F. Croce |