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PARTISAN REVIEW
Nabokov's whimsical, self-infatuated narrators, a Russian emigre
living in Germany in the early thirties, perceives as his double a laborer
who bears him little or no resemblance. Eager to escape his present
circumstances, he plans to murder himself in the figure of his ostensi–
ble double. Predictably, no one identifies the corpse as Hermann, the
possibility never in question. The film of
Despair
is so suffused with
evocative details, is so world-weary and ironic that the plot only asserts
itself in the second half and then as an apparent afterthought. In a
characteristically impressive sequence, Hermann (Dirk Bogarde) wit–
nesses himself making love to his wife while sitting in a chair at the
end of a long hall, or perceives himself sitting in a chair while making
love to his wife. That he sees himself as his own double, however,
undermines the notion that he can perceive someone who bears him no
resemblance also as a double.
Despair
is an elegantly laborious tour de
force that, like the main gesture of its protagonist, comes to grief.
The Shout,
Jerzy Skolimowski
In answer to the query, "Don't you think a film ought to have a
beginning, a middle, and an end," Godard is reputed to have said,
"Yes, but not necessarily in that order." Skolimowski, in his first
English language film, tells his exotic story-really, a story within a
story-with willful confusion of time, playing off the nightmare of
fragmented structure against the horror film conventions of the narra–
tive.
As
with Skolimowski's earlier movies,
The Shout
has considerable
energy and inventiveness, moving as it does between subjective reality
and rational explanation. Alan Bates plays the sorcerer-madman who
tells the interior story while helping to score a cricket match played at
an insane asylum. Within his own narrative, the Bates figure is a man
capable of producing a shout of such enormous power that it kills
whoever hears the sound. He moves in with a musician and his wife,
using his apparent sorcery to torment the man and make love to the
woman. Whether the central figure is monstrous or a harmless
madman-both possibilities exist with equal justice-finally requires
no answer. The plays between real and illusory occasion the inventive–
ness of the film.
It
is the fragmented form of
The Shout,
the confusion
of tenses, the wit of its invented order, and not the narrative, that make
the Skol imowski film an arresting work.
Violette,
Oaude Chabrol
Like
The Shout
and
Despair,
the new Chabrol, which held sway
closing night, is determinedly ambiguous. Based on a real event, an
