Magreek to Me
La Belle Captive (1983)
directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
The screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad - which you'd think would be right up my alley, and might be, if I remembered it - liked René Magritte enough to pepper an otherwise static "erotic thriller" with oblique re-enactments of famous paintings that I do remember enough to remember an ongoing indifference to. The same rich stink of Eyes Wide Shut's eerily dark and pedigreed recesses finds an outlet in the shadows of the most open-ended of La Belle Captive's enigmas, as if a more sinister power play lurked just beyond Robbe-Grillet's willingness to really exploit it. But aside from a few memorable faces (the inspector especially) and a once-menacing, twice-horrific encroaching circle of tuxedoed sadists, no clear line emerges between passive and passionate intentions. The result, per usual in cases of authorial abdication, is a wash.
directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
The screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad - which you'd think would be right up my alley, and might be, if I remembered it - liked René Magritte enough to pepper an otherwise static "erotic thriller" with oblique re-enactments of famous paintings that I do remember enough to remember an ongoing indifference to. The same rich stink of Eyes Wide Shut's eerily dark and pedigreed recesses finds an outlet in the shadows of the most open-ended of La Belle Captive's enigmas, as if a more sinister power play lurked just beyond Robbe-Grillet's willingness to really exploit it. But aside from a few memorable faces (the inspector especially) and a once-menacing, twice-horrific encroaching circle of tuxedoed sadists, no clear line emerges between passive and passionate intentions. The result, per usual in cases of authorial abdication, is a wash.
posted by NPK at 9:48 AM
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