This is probably the most baffling and frustrating movie I have ever seen.
It has all the elements to be a camp classic. The production design is bizarre and original. Terry Southern's screenplay is often witty. Jane Fonda and Anita Pallenberg are wonderful. I ought to love it. Instead, I find it almost intolerable.
From the opening credits, which go on too long, and the first bars of that execrable music, you sense something is seriously amiss with this movie. The camera seems to be in the wrong place all the time and the wrong shots are held too long. It often seems as if that they simply shot footage with no idea how it was going to fit together. You suspect that weeks may have passed between shots so that nobody could remember what had come before or what would come after. Faced with this hopeless material, the editor was in despair and just gave up, so nothing cuts together properly. At best, the picture looks like the roughest of rough cuts. At worst, the editing seems to be almost completely random.
As a result, there is no pace or rhythm, either in individual scenes, or in the movie as a whole. People wander about from scene to scene with no purpose or point. Soon, all the energy drains out of the picture and you find yourself stranded in a weird limbo in which nothing seems to be happening, even when it is, nothing connects with anything else and time stretches out endlessly before you. At times the boredom is so intense it makes your teeth ache.
I have seen and commented on some of the most incompetent movies ever made (Fire Maidens, The Flying Saucer, Mesa of Lost Women) but this movie seems to be inept in ways that transcend even those notorious turkeys. Although Roger Vadim had made at least a dozen pictures before this one, it feels like it was assembled by people that had never even seen a movie before, let alone made one. Of one thing I am sure - it could never have been made in America. It is purest Eurotrash.
I have finally posted my response to this unaccountable movie, but I know I will be coming back again and again to edit it, because I realise I haven't even come close to identifying what makes it such a uniquely stultifying experience.
It has all the elements to be a camp classic. The production design is bizarre and original. Terry Southern's screenplay is often witty. Jane Fonda and Anita Pallenberg are wonderful. I ought to love it. Instead, I find it almost intolerable.
From the opening credits, which go on too long, and the first bars of that execrable music, you sense something is seriously amiss with this movie. The camera seems to be in the wrong place all the time and the wrong shots are held too long. It often seems as if that they simply shot footage with no idea how it was going to fit together. You suspect that weeks may have passed between shots so that nobody could remember what had come before or what would come after. Faced with this hopeless material, the editor was in despair and just gave up, so nothing cuts together properly. At best, the picture looks like the roughest of rough cuts. At worst, the editing seems to be almost completely random.
As a result, there is no pace or rhythm, either in individual scenes, or in the movie as a whole. People wander about from scene to scene with no purpose or point. Soon, all the energy drains out of the picture and you find yourself stranded in a weird limbo in which nothing seems to be happening, even when it is, nothing connects with anything else and time stretches out endlessly before you. At times the boredom is so intense it makes your teeth ache.
I have seen and commented on some of the most incompetent movies ever made (Fire Maidens, The Flying Saucer, Mesa of Lost Women) but this movie seems to be inept in ways that transcend even those notorious turkeys. Although Roger Vadim had made at least a dozen pictures before this one, it feels like it was assembled by people that had never even seen a movie before, let alone made one. Of one thing I am sure - it could never have been made in America. It is purest Eurotrash.
I have finally posted my response to this unaccountable movie, but I know I will be coming back again and again to edit it, because I realise I haven't even come close to identifying what makes it such a uniquely stultifying experience.