Polanski's lickerish private joke about a hippie hitchhiker (someone has described her as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Little Annie Fanny, though she favors the latter) who stumbles from a highway rape into a secluded Italian villa and into the mixed-nuts company of a bedridden patriarch, a syphilitic Lothario, an arthritic pianist, a prankster with a harpoon gun, a pair of American tourists, and others. It is a very chic-looking film, and almost in spite of itself it frequently evokes the vacuous elegance of the dolce vita genre: the actors' lonely isolation on the wide screen, the wonderful terraces overlooking the Mediterranean, Marcello Mastroianni idling in sunglasses, etc. But Polanski intends to keep you adrift from familiar ground. He cultivates his trademark bizarreries to such a point that there is no longer a norm to measure them by; and the nonsensical slapstick storyline produces no livelier a response than an occasional shrug. Originally titled WHAT? -- but the self-mockery implied therein is overshadowed by presumptuous self-congratulation. Who but Polanski would care enough to ask? With Sydne Rome. (1973) — Duncan Shepherd
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