118
MARK JAY MIRSKY
widely in content, fonn and intention as
Duet for Cannibals
and
I am
Curious (Yellow)
should share the same ingredients. It is
perhaps
a
disservice to Susan Sontag's carefully wrought
Cannibals
to yoke it with
such a sloppy, careless bedfellow as
Curious Yellow,
but both asswne the
heroism of permissive sex and radical left-wing politics.
Curious Yellow
is a hodgepodge that makes
Easy
Rider
seem like the sheerest classical
.restraint and again the temptation
is
to yield
to
this octopus, so like
the heroine's sexual promise, float in a soft, funny miasma, but boredom
will have its say and after awhile, one
is
yawning in the midst of her
orgasms.
It need not have been so. The outline of a story surfaces now
and then in the sea of celluloid from which they cut the
fUm;
those
pathetic moments between father and daughter when the fonner finds
himself helpless and curious in the face of
his
offspring's sexual rapacity;
the much touted scene of screwing in front of the stiff soldiery guard–
ing a regal residence; a romp in the crotch of an old, huge tree, erupt–
ing into the veined limbs of a dignified forest patriach. These are brief
flashes of a terrible curiosity which we
share
with the world peeping
into the characters' lives. A world that they dare to
be
curious about.
But so much of their nakedness is sloppy and breezy that all sense of
privacy is lost. They don't care, why should we?
The
politics they are
involved in borrows this flipness, and so after awhile, the whole bag
seems a tedious intenninable joke. Radical politics
is
like a game, so
much so that the film at times is an exercise in unintentional irony.
In
Duet for Cannibals
the politics are deadly serious, but sex is open
for experiment. In this sense the film feels old-fashioned; yet its power
is in this aura, of an older puritan tradition coiling to show an under–
belly of repressed lust and madness. Certainly the sex
is
much more
erotic than in
I
am Curious
if only because taboos are being violated
by people to whom they mean something; therefore, the swapping of
partners is not bored but tense with obscenity, prurient emotion. I came
away shaken by the cruel pleasure one
was
forced to experience watch–
ing the young couple writhe and yielding to temptation. I quarrel, how–
ever, with the director's pacing of he.r film, so slow that one caught sight
of the twist in the .road long before the action arrived there. And I
object to a certain cuteness in the older couple,
too
much like puppet–
masters doing their tricks. It is no wonder that though the older man
is presented as a famous left-wing political figure, a friend of Brecht's,
we learn nothing about
his
work, nor about the tonnent that drives
him
to sex games. The older people remain too clever an enigma.
Coming Apart
has the weakest story line of all the films reviewed
