After ten minutes of the Vadim film, which features a convoluted story about some kind of Cleopatra liberation thing, bored narration, and relies on ominous music to suggest evil, I skipped it. Is that cheating? I don't think so -- if each of the directors had made their shorts and released them separately, I doubt I'd be interested in Vadim's. (Though I still want to see "And God Created Woman.") As a side note, I mistakenly thought that the woman in "William Wilson," the Malle film, was Claudia Cardinale instead of Bardot; I figured that while Jane Fonda was in the Vadim film, that Bardot would have naturally been in the Vadim film, too. Silly me.
Malle's film, on the other hand, starts with a classic scene of dread -- a bloody-faced man running, quick cuts, loud music. Malle is the one director who gives into the classic Poe sense of foreboding. He delves immediately into childhood and summons up a strange, sadomasochistic and almost sexual perversion of the young Delon amidst the boarding/military school, torturing for fun, always with his bemused, blank face. At times the film tests your patience -- Why does Delon constantly have a group of followers around him wherever he goes? Why is there a seemingly real operation? Why is he permitted to whip a woman? -- but its logic oddly works, even though it makes very little literal sense. Delon's performance in the film is, as usual, very good: he doesn't get much to do, but he manages to be psychotic, insane, bemused, sexually frustrated, and sublime at different points throughout the film. I think Roman Polanski must be a Delon fan and must have seen this, as the ending (not to give anything away...) is very similar to that of "The Tenant," and there's a hilarious image in Fellini's film that also shows up in Polanski's film. (And aside from that, his "Knife in the Water," though stylistically and tonally different, has similarities in content to "Purple Noon.")
And a pop culture Fellini! His segment is quite reflexive, to the point that it does a twofold honoring of Terence Stamp: his character is a great British actor honoring Italian cinema, with mentions of Dreyer and Pasolini (who Stamp worked with that same year). It's partly a mockery of awards and film academia, with babble about conceptualizing and structuralist film. As is often the case with Fellini, it's hard to separate the genuine weirdness from the comedy, and with Stamp he finds an actor who can slide into the role of a harried actor with the same ease and gift for buffoonery as Mastroianni. It's hard to see any relation to Poe until near the end, when the film morphs into an interesting highway ghost story, complete with a ludicrous punctuation mark of comic goriness. 8/10 (for both Malle and Fellini's films).
11 out of 20 found this helpful