CINEMA
Love stories
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
A Severed Head (x, Curzon) is fast, catty and highly entertaining. A vintner (Ian Holm) of impeccable background and tailor- ing has a brother (Clive Revill), a mistress (Jennie Linden), a wife (Lee Remick), her psychoanalyst (Richard Attenborough) and his half-sister (Claire- Bloom) revolving around him, and coupling and uncoupling like Clapham Junction sidings on a busy afternoon. Rather than go into the per- mutations of these vile bodies I shall simply say that the film is full of civilised people trying to behave with propriety in uncivilised circumstances. The world would be Evelyn Waugh% updated, except that the incest and promiscuity are more blatant, and the wit more mordant and humiliating.
All in all it is a very dark comedy which gets its laughs from witty, insensitive people rationalising indecorous situations in decorous epigrams. Total absorption in self is the ambition, and nothing—wife, mistress —is so terrible to lose as Poise. Ian Holm is splendidly funny as the vintner struggling to retain his lucidity and Poise in the midst of the sexual turmoil and never quite succeed- ing, and the other acting is of an equally high standard. Richard Attenborough is podgy and glutinous as the frightful psycho- analyst demolishing all opposition with a weaponry of Freudian terms. Lee Remick's pampered wife, all Poise and flutter, is sufficiently artificial to be uncrowned queen of the sidings; more sought after than her husband's mistress who is inelegant enough to have passionate affections. Claire Bloom makes an Iris Murdochian figure out of the Oxford lecturer, Dr Klein, instinct with dark looks and Meaningful silences, who is above this human comedy and views it in romantically anthropological terms as the battle, perhaps, of good against evil for sovereignty or at any rate survival.
Underneath the surface brilliance there may well be some interesting intentions, which have been dissipated into witty, throwaway insults like, `I fully realise that tormenting people is just a by-product of a character like yours.' Dick Clement directs and moves the narrative along at a good speed, although at the expense of some irritating cuts from situations that seem to have just begun developing. Frederic Raphael's screenplay is taken from Iris Murdoch's book and the play of the same name on which she collaborated with J. B. Priestley.
The Raging Moon ( AA, ABC 2) deals with just one love affair with what seems, by comparison, an almost embarrassing sin- cerity. It is set, most of it, in a home for cripples. Bruce is a tough northerner in his mid-twenties, a footballer and writer who wants to escape from his restricted home surroundings and become a famous poet. On the evening of his brother's wedding he is attacked by a disease similar to polio, and confined to a wheelchair. Unable to live at home, he goes south to a Home run by the Church, The film charts his reactions, through disbelief, resentment, bitterness, and finally acceptance, which is when he falls in love with Jill, a fellow inmate.
It sounds like the kind of determinedly grim, understated love story which British film-makers traditionally enjoy. Certainly it isn't helped on its way by Bryan Forbes's direction which tends to require the camera tilted upwards at the birds in the sky when someone makes a remark about freedom, and at leafy branches when there is a whisper of consummating love. But his screenplay is excellent, and Malcolm McDowell and Nanette Newman are so good in the main parts that false sentimen- tality is avoided. Mr McDowell's perform- ance, in particular, is expressive of all the petty frustrations and humiliations of being a cripple; and the ending is genuinely mov- ing. Not exactly an entertaining film, but a serious and good one all the same, the most successful so far of Bryan Forbes's crop.
Erotissimo (x, Paris-Pullmln) is a fren- zied Gallic farce about a woman (Annie Girardot) who shops through half of Paris trying to make herself desirable because her rich husband is so harried by the tax inspector at the office that he hasn't the energy to have it off with her at night. Intended as a satire on erotic advertising, it is trite, tiresome and totally unfunny. De- liberately unerotic, too, in case anyone is thinking of other reasons for going.
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