Secret Ceremony/Driver's Seat

DEMENTIA PEACOCKS

Under Losey’s dullard cool, Secret Ceremony is a crash course on pseudo Henry Jamesion schizophrenia, molestation and Liz’s mother love gone bonkers. Throw in wacky Mia Farrow, Dames Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown as “slightly Jewish” dyke kleptos and leprechaun-bearded Robert Mitchum and it all becomes akin to a comedic 60s Eleventh Hour freakfest. Whatever the pretensions intended from the award-winning story by Argentinean Marco Denevi, they were put on the back burner with Liz and what’s cooking are meals of mockery, debasement, sexual peccadilloes. She serves up one deliciously bad entrée after another, so over-seasoned that watching her could cause a fast track to the toilet. (She’s often been diarrhetic—blowing out lines and facial reactions only the sulfur dioxide of matches could dissipate.) But the shock of Liz—double chinned, teeth wasting away from the booze, in Woolworth black pajama-like blouse and skirt, legged in diamond-shaped mesh stockings—on her way to St. Mary Magdeline Church to pray after fellating a john and then heading towards the church’s cemetery to drop flowers on her daughter’s grave, with Mia trailing in delusional hope she’s her mother back from the dead, is just too irresistible for guilty pleasure seekers. At first, Mia’s a turn off; maybe I couldn’t get passed Ava’s famous quip she “always knew Frank Sinatra would end up in bed with a little boy.” Yet she’s a marvel as a bi-Peter Pan trapped in permanent looniness: instant bananas when she sits down next to Liz on the bus; eerily discomforting when brushing Mummie’s hair; unnerving when joining her in a post-Cleopatra bathtub; flesh crawling when rubbing her back; manipulative with teasing ambiguity when playing games with stepdaddy Mitchum; indescribable feigning rape and pregnancy. She pulls out all the dementia-in-full-peacock bloom to achieve her finale. Craziness is intended star but it’s the real house stealing the picture. Mazier urban London digs would be difficult to find: construction having started in 1898 and completed five years later, Debenham House owes its imposing eclectic style to several architects, and its most outstanding features, aside from the labyrinth of halls, rooms, nooks and crannies, are the Moorish style balconies, woodwork and the blue and aquamarine tiles used inside and out. Scouting locations, Losey remembered the house because he’d often pass it when taking his son to a nearby school, and even production designer Richard Macdonald knew of it, though initially he thought it wasn’t quite right for the movie’s neurotic ambiance. Until he and Losey went inside: having been used for a time by a church organization to care for the mentally ill, they only had to restore the William Morris wallpaper, add art nouveau objects and fixtures and furniture and clean up the grounds. Different stories on whether they were permitted to use the interiors at length but the movie’s economized budget says they used what would be too expensive to duplicate for the shorter scenes, and the sets built—primarily the mother’s bedroom and attached bath—were faithful to original designs. Notwithstanding Losey’s claims, there’s nothing about the story we’d care to believe as “realistic,” but we can accept the psychoturgy performed as ritual by Liz, Mia, Mitchum and the other demented peafowl is likely the result of being overtaken by Debenham’s hallowed creepiness. In Blu-ray, the locale and Liz’s pigging out and the purples really pop.

Because the catalog of Liz’s movies includes a few too many braying slatterns, it’s a difficult choice to name the most appalling one, but her psycho Lise in Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s surprisingly faithful 1974 version of Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat would be very high on everyone’s list. Until we begin to see this may come to be the best of them. We’re startled at the very beginning: seething in caustic edgy indignation when told by a clerk the dress she’s about to buy is made with the miracle of stain-resistant fabric, Liz vents the vapors and looks like we do when we’ve been on Jack Daniel’s for a longer time than we want to admit—bloaty-faced, murky-eyed, blemished to the max. In the store’s dressing room, she wears a hefty orthopedic workhorse bra grossly suggestive—rollover picture at top left. Watching mesmerized by the successive scenes of dissipation, aided and abetted by Vittorio Storaro’s camera, we begin to feel there’s an effort towards a breakthrough, she’s determined not to be the glamour puss with a cadre of camouflagers hiding defects in face and body. Not the intended deglamourizing of Virginia Woolf, but the kind of cheap-thrill freedom we get when we’re cutting loose on the slum low. She has bits here far and away some of her flashiest—for example, at airport security, and on the plane when she’s seeking the attention of one man (the attractive man-boy played by Maxence Mailfort) but ends up getting it from another (the repulsive Ian Bannen as a macrobiotic nut). She has bitch-fun when Bannen kisses her, followed by a brief scene in which she rubs her tits, and soon takes off her dress to show us she’s still got enough of a shape to walk around in a slip. Then—Dios Mia!—she discovers a dirty glass in the bathroom of her Rome hotel room. The flash continues in a store when she steals a scarf, in a car with a mechanic who wants her to give him a blowjob. (The stud is played by Guido Mannari, with whom Liz reportedly had a fling.) In a performance unlike anything she’s done before or since, there’s a disquieting buzz in it, maybe desperation, and at times something new, even unsettling in the voice, too. (As with so many of her later movies, including her moments here with Mona Washbourne, she can irk with her shifts to crapass accents in the same sequence.) Looking this disheveled, with hair ratted up, so gaudy in guest bathroom wallpaper coat and upchucky Polack dress that her landlady laughs at her, traipsing around with a plastic handbag, it’s easy to suggest Liz has the same death wish as her crazy character. Many things go haywire in this movie—all the men are fever-pitched—but her daring isn’t one of them; she’s cult classic fearless.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com