Adapted from the Pierre Louys novel, La Femme et le Pantin. The story, in its fifth incarnation on screen, tells how a suave, sixtyish Frenchman becomes pathetically and inextricably hooked on a Spanish flirt named Conchita, and how she keeps the old buzzard in a constant dither with her teasingly hot-and-cold affections and her stubborn withholding of her most highly prized possession, her maidenhead. (Because the story is told from the utterly flummoxed and possibly jaundiced viewpoint of the man, it is impossible to discern anything of the girl's motive, not even enough to be certain she isn't simply an artful Helen Gurley Brown strategist in affairs of the heart and a devout believer in the Victorian credo that men only marry virgins.) By about the halfway point, you ought to realize that the goal is going to remain forever unattainable; and after that, the movie turns into something of a monotonous sexual cliffhanger in which every episode poses the question about the Pearl White heroine, "How is she going to get out of it this time?' The big gimmick of this serene, enervated, and repetitious movie is Luis Buñuel's casting coup of having two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, alternate in the role of Conchita. The two are not treated as dramatically opposing aspects of one personality -- Jekyll and Hyde -- but rather are arbitrarily interchangeable; and the effect of this device is a richly sardonic joke on the self-deception and whimsicality of the hero's, and all men's, grand romantic passion -- the apple of one's eye could just as well be a tomato. With Fernando Rey. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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