ARTS
Colour slides
Peter Ackroyd
The Oberwald Mystery ('A', Camden Plaza) A silver horse casts blue shadows over an orange field: the colours resemble some mismatch between pointilliste painting and the wrapping around a chocolate bar; the trees, of a green never before seen on earth, have a hard pink outline as though they had been hand-painted by a child. Even when this film seems most lurid, it concentrates the eyes wonderfully. Michelangelo Antonioni has experimented with the uses of colour before but here he has, as it were, entered the laboratory and closed the door behind him. The Oberwald Mystery was ade originally for Italian State Television; it was recorded on video-tape and has now been transferred to film. Antonioni has been able to change shades and tones at the turn of a dial and these ethereal, electronically induced colours — the silver-greys, the anthers, the golds — induce a certain sense of wonder; the effect is similar, I imagine, to that produced by the first '3D' pictures so Many years ago. The film itself is a perfect medium for the Message which video equipment imparts. Its theme has to do with the shuffling of certain surface characteristics, dependent °,13on bravura and a kind of showiness. A Made for television' film means something rather different in Italy to what it means in America, where 'TV movies' are simply the Cultural lees which have risen to the top. The Oberwald Mystery, however, treats television as if it were a magic casket from Which anything can be drawn. The script has been adapted from Cocteau's play, The Eagle Has Two Heads — a melodrama, or sYmbolic drama, depending on the strictness of your sense of genre, and how censorious an attitude you take to the deliberate presentation of rarefied, almost In1Personal, feeling. An assassin has penetrated into the bedroom of a Queen, a dea Qbscondita who since the death of her young husband has wandered mysteriously betWeen palaces. The assassin is also a poet — they tend to be in Cocteau — and the Queen sees in him an emblem of her destiny. They enter a strange pact — If you do not kill me, I Shall kill you,' the Queen tells him — which is Worked out against a background of Court Intrigue. It is, if you like, wildly improbable — but °nly if you insist upon a conventional ,aesthetics'. It is no more improbable, in fact, than the realistic mode of a 'Play for Today' — it simply requires a different set of expectations and assumptions before it can ,he properly understood, and only a • purblind puritanism takes exception to the expression of heightened sentiment and the presentation of grand, doomed figures who see around them signs and intimations of their fate. Monica Vitti is magnificent here as the Queen — 'I am the storm!' she announces, and goes on to rumble a bit. Passionate, haughty, beautiful — every inch a queen, although perhaps a queen of the music halls. The assassin is played here by Franco Branciaroli like a large-eyed, melancholy hero of the silent screen; in recognition of the fact, Antonioni sometimes paints him silver and grey.
It is, of course, perfect for Italian television: all those strangled looks, as if the air were choking the characters with an excess of brightness, the fiery words, the sudden moments of passion which just as suddenly evaporate, the protracted silences. And, if nothing else, Antonioni has proved his versatility. He has taken to television with the panache of an entertainer who was born, not made, and has adapted himself effortlessly to the demands of a popular audience. But although The Oberwald Mystery has all the characteristics of television soap-opera, it has been transfigured by the power of Antonioni's imagination. It is as if we were watching a cross between a play by Maeterlinck and a spaghetti Western. It has all the grandeur of the one combined with the strange, dream-like discontinuity of the other.
Sometimes, perhaps, it seems preposterous — but only when we close our eyes; what is said or done is never as important here as the way it looks, since this is a film that dazzles the eyes. Certain characters carry around with them an aura of sad light, like dying stars; when the Queen stares out of the window, the screen is filled suddenly with a new colour as though the world had become instinct with her thoughts. Sometimes double images appear standing silently beside each character, as if they were being guarded by watchful spirits. Nothing stays the same colour for very long, thus lending a curiously magical, or evanescent, quality to the shape of things.
No one is going to claim, of course, that this is Antonioni's finest film but the techniques with which he is now working have provided him with a fresh access of strength. The film has the chilling beauty of a deliberately made thing, a sport; its 'experiment' needs now to be integrated within a larger, living design.
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