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"À la mémoire de Fritz Lang," cf. Secret Beyond the Door. Alice Carroll, as in Carroll's Alice, Sylvia Kristel through the looking glass of second-wave feminism. She ditches hubby and drives into the rainy night like Marion Crane, the manor house is seen through a shattered windshield. Host (Charles Vanel) and valet (Jean Carmet) welcome her with omelettes and wine, the broken clock's pendulum starting swinging while she slumbers. "We don't care too much about time here." By morning the site is eerily vacant, a luxurious mausoleum encircled by a wooded labyrinth, all roads lead back to it. "You'll have to live in the dark for a while," booms a disembodied voice. "Make the most of it." The lineage is particularly rich (Polanski's What?, Altman's Images, Malle's Black Moon), Claude Chabrol contributes a marvelously sunlit cauchemar form. The flight of emancipation leads to a Möbius strip of cages and puzzles, "logical arguments" find no favor with condescending male guardians. "Pas de questions," repeats the stranger (André Dussollier) by the endless wall. Whistling kettles and hiccupping Victrolas, electronic zaps and gnomic hums, sounds of a behemoth leisurely digesting la prisonnière. The air itself warps like a fun-house mirror, the heroine reaches for a telephone only to hear her own voice talking back to her. There's a word for this reality, "transformable," a funeral gathering at the café suddenly explodes into a boisterous carouse. Throughout, the runaway proves herself a resourceful explorer—while her captors gas on about feminine willpower, she's busy thumbing through a translation of Borges' Ficciones. Checkerboard floors and corkscrew staircases, malevolent syringes and infernal portals. "Have you begun to understand yet?" The last shot revises the whole thing as a spoof of Sautet's Les Choses de la Vie. With Fernand Ledoux, François Perrot, Bernard Rousselet, Katia Romanoff, and Thomas Chabrol.
--- Fernando F. Croce |