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The model is Saura, who returns the compliment in Elisa, Vida mía. The lass in Madeira (Emma Cohen) is engaged to the archeological student (Wal Davis), Papá (Howard Vernon) reacts with a noose, his dangling reflection on the gilded mirror wrecks the daughter in her wedding dress. "His presence is always with me," even after she leaves the island and joins a jazz group at a Lisbon nightclub. The father's spectral rasp beckons whenever another man gets close to her, "a great emptiness in my head" launches her murderous trances, the shaggy trumpeter (Robert Woods) woos her in the park and gets stabbed in the neck. A haunted memory, a recurring ditty: "It's Madeira, it's Madeira / That calls me right back to you..." Psychology and myth braided in an incestuous death drift, one of Jesús Franco's purest fugues. The theater director (Ramiro Oliveros) seeks a leading lady for his production of Euripides, "imagine Medea clad in a romantic dress, gold candelabras and the music of Strauss!" Proscenium "like a Gothic cathedral," the fish out of its bowl that melts into a dagger, "Borges y yo" for the killing helplessly observed. The sleepwalker's melancholy, a musical approach to mental states. Going home means the childhood villa ominously looming over lush travelogue landscapes, the graying roué (Philippe Lemaire) spots a new conquest when not spouting touristic cant. "It's easy to demand freedom, then perpetuate tyranny." Memory's burden, "a bitter truth" on human volition, not Dante but Boris Vian. Cohen's baleful blue eyes hold everything together, right up to the sublime dénouement of tolling bells and bridal veils. Bergman in Face to Face takes up the theme on another line of abstraction. With Françoise Brion, Alice Arno, Ada Tauler, and Roger Sarbib.
--- Fernando F. Croce |