Roman Polanski's lecherous 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 roadside rape into the mixed-nuts company at a secluded Italian villa: a bedridden patriarch, an arthritic pianist, a syphilitic Lothario, a prankster with a harpoon gun, a couple of American tourists, others. It is a very chic-looking film, and almost in spite of itself it frequently evokes the empty elegance of the 1960s dolce vita genre -- the wonderful terraces overlooking the Mediterranean, Marcello Mastroianni lolling about in sunglasses, etc. But Polanski wants to cut you adrift from familiar ground as much as possible. And he succeeds to the extent that his desultory slapstick storyline gets no livelier a viewer response than an occasional shrug or snore. The movie's original title, taken from an Abbott-and-Costello dadaist dialogue at the fadeout, is What? The self-mockery implied in that title is far outweighed by the presumptuous self-congratulation. In reality, no one other than Polanski would care enough to ask. (1973) — Duncan Shepherd
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