Cinema
On the Vampage
By ISABEL QUIGLY Eve. (Cameo-Royal; 'X' cer- tificate.) Eve is three-fifths preposterous, but Joseph Losey, the Ancient Mariner of film-makers, glit- tering eye, skinny hand and superlative techniques, is tre- mendous. It seems to me a mis- take to see this latest film of his as just a 'vehicle' for the virtuosity of Jeanne Moreau, who, playing the most expensive tart in Rome, establishes herself firmly among the grandes ,eocottes, man-eaters, man-whippers, blue angels and (in short) fairy-tale vamps of the screen. If you want an example of the cinema's quite creepy subjectiveness, compare her bath scene in La Norte. that drab depresser of the erotic temperature. with the bath scenes and general stripteasing of Eve: not just the face, but the whole skeleton, not to mention the flesh on top of it. seems altered by the fact that in the one case the camera looks at her with dis- illusion, in the other with what Spaniards call illusion: the body, incredibly, is the same.
For it is Losey's direction that is the point, the saving grace, and his personality (not, ex- cept in a very subordinate, Trilbyish way, hers) that counts; for without his control of the way, we look at her (more than the way she behaves), much of the vampaging would spill over, as it nearly does, into farce. He is one of those rare directors who seem not to have come to the cinema from outside, but to have been born in- side it, somehow to float in the medium, to live (not just look at things) cinematically; incapable of making a dull frame or a meaningless image and often, in fact, jamming the screen so tight with meaning, references, nudges and suggestions that you are almost irritated at having only two eyes, one brain and a second or two to absorb it. Eve is full of secrets and fetishes, hints, jokes, mysteries cinematic or (presumably) personal, but they make it (to me, anyway) thick and plummy and all the richer, not remote and 'cir- cular' and all the thinner, as tends to happen among esoteric film-makers. To initiates this may provide a kind of crossword-puzzle fun, to others a satisfying complexity and depth of imagery in which individual allusions may some- times be too bizarre to catch. And Losey is not a 'coterie' film-maker, anyway.
The theme is -one of insufficiency, in the rugged, unlikely person of Stanley Baker. Be- tween Rome and Venice, caught up in inter- national filmdom, and with a beautiful nice-girl trying to marry him, he is pursued by the fact that he's a personal and professional phoney who's published his dead brother's book as his own and is now expected to keep up the output and his tough reputation as a miner, which he never was. Enter the vamp, and the results, from the start, are predictable. From a rag of a story and the corniest, limpest action, Losey has made a film that (in spite of, I believe, savage cutting) is tight and controlled from start to finish, in- tellectually rather than 'daringly' sophisticated, and visually a cine.aste's treasure-trove, with paste and diamonds almost indistinguishable in the general rococo.
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