DVD Re-Issue of the Week

Filmed in a mixture of the pellucid, sun-drenched style of 60s Italian & French cinerotica & the dark - almost noir - style of Italian gialli, Leconte's film delights in fetishistic surfaces, in starched white shirts, in blowing flags, drapes & sun dresses, in the rumpled tailored suits & scarves of European expatriates & the mottled brown leather of well-traveled suitcases. It's so vivid you can almost smell the blend of opium & sea brine. A lush orchestral score cries out for Edda Dell'Orso's wordless vocals, but shimmers gorgeously without it as well.

The story is relatively simple, though spiced with exotic mysteries that are - wisely I think - never quite resolved. Victor, a young Russian count adrift in Europe in 1958, living off of the intermittent sale of rarities from his family's renowned butterfly collection (shades of Nabokov), crosses paths with a cryptically beautiful actress named Yvonne & her elderly, flamboyantly gay, traveling companion, Dr. Meinthe. Jean-pierre Marielle, a veteran of 60s & early 70s sexploitation/giallo, shines here as the world-weary doctor who drinks his port wine with a straw, sports a Karl May fez & shouts to all within earshot that he's "The Queen of Belgium." Meinthe is equal parts George Sanders, Peter Lorre & William Burroughs, the sort of man who finds conscience distasteful, but is consumed by it nonetheless. Victor & Yvonne are soon in the grip of sexual obsession & while more heady themes of exile, film history & the onset of the Algerian conflict may fleck their bubble of mutual need, sex is the star here & it's most likely the copious nudity & enraptured love-making you'll remember about the film. Well, that & the not-so-good doctor.

This is pornography for people who like to read Marguerite Duras or Andre Gide aloud to one another before & after they screw.

-Charles Lieurance