On Screen

...Despite the rather different ages of the characters, this is a kind of Lolita, with the childlikeness of the girl perhaps overstressed by her licking her lips during the performance of crimes...

...It is the story of a very bright but disturbed young man released from a house of correction who gets a job in a small New England town...

...Though Alain Delon is not the mature, masterful Daniel, he has a handsome, set face...

...The mixture of naivete and cynicism, of coziness and exploitation, is the portrait of the authors as not quite so young men and explains where all those flower children have gone...

...Jean-Louis Trintignant looks into the camera with the morose solicitude of a dandy counting his gray hairs in the mirror, and only in the drunk scene does he allow his well-starched expression to get ever so slightly rumpled...

...Just before the killing, Frederique says, "You horrify me...

...Why does it work...

...The film translates this into Mod oversimplifications: "A twist of the throttle and I obliterate this muck and turn myself on...

...Where the lover in the novel whips the tied-up girl with a bunch of roses, here a vase full of roses serves merely to hide the lover's pudenda during a cuddly nude scene...

...both photographed and directed, and as will happen when those two jobs are done by the same person—one thinks of A Man and a Woman—the cinematography gets the starring role...

...Her attitude is slavish adoration mixed with sporadic arrogance and petty sabotage...

...Freeman's researches for her recent and shallow book about the pornographic press, The Undergrowth of Literature, must have been enormously helpful...

...There are some variations in the pattern, but the gratuitous bitchiness is always there —the more unmotivated, the more Metaphysical, Significant, and Profound...

...Frederique seduces her, and whisks her off to the lush villa in St.-Tropez, where she already maintains a pair of semicretinous and presumably pederastic males who apparently serve as jesters but do not really amuse anyone...

...In fact, it is a nasty, junior-grade sadism his characters practice on one another, usually consisting of leeringly rubbing in some kind of advantage (sexual, intellectual, financial) over someone less privileged, who may suffer humiliation in abject submission or bite back like a rabid underdog...

...At the end of the ride during which the reminiscing occurs, Rebecca, on the outskirts of Heidelberg, dies in a highly symbolic crash...

...Or take this, all part of the film heroine's voice-over monologue in-terieur: "I was an adulterous teenage bride...

...Acting does not enter into the picture...

...Too sappily good-natured, too commercial, too lacking in the old Beatle rebelliousness—these charges have been brought against Yellow Submarine with some justification...

...Not since the Seven Against Thebes was there so mighty a coalition, and here, moreover, the outcome is pleasanter: The Pop Muses are heard again in Pepper-land, and the Blue Meanies are sent to blue blazes...

...The last part of the film, in which melodrama refuses to grow into tragedy, seems a bit hurried, a bit undernourished...

...and so on...

...Even out of this unpromising material something could be made, if Chabrol had a sense for people, places, and continuity...

...and, furthermore, everything is shit...

...for the rest, there are four script-writers writing their fines, four actors speaking them, and God knows how many animators under Heinz Edelmann drawing them and their fantasy world...

...Whereupon Why comments, "Alors, salut la vieille...

...Episode drifts into episode, movement is haphazard and not followed through, random violence is expected to create tension...

...A film by Chabrol is like a game of chess where, at Chabrol's whim, a pawn can get knighted, and a bishop can carry on like a raving queen...

...Throughout, the motorcycle is represented as a great phallic beast, the symbolic extension, or erection, of the lover, sometimes even transcending and superseding him...

...As everyone must know by now, this is a cartoon feature in which the Beatles are represented by their own singing and music-making...

...St.-Tropez is dull in winter, and Chabrol makes it even duller by not being able to convey the rhythms and patterns of hibernation...

...As Paul is about to enter, the film ends—as evasively and phonily as it progressed...

...Credited with fathering the New Wave, Chabrol hit his stride with his initial film, Le beau Serge, and the rest was downhill...

...The aphrodisiac effect of murder on her is likewise hit a trifle too hard...

...Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive...

...For a thorough audio-visual sauna, however, there is nothing like immersing oneself in the Yellow Submarine...

...In this Beatliad, the irrepressible four save the good, tuneful folk of Pepper-land from the monstrous, music-hating Blue Meanies...

...It is never made clear what anyone sees in anyone else, why loyalties or affections or desires (or whatever it is that these personages have) change in the way they do, and what the various relations involve or even imply...

...Because of its reckless generosity...

...Marianne Faith-full is bedecked with fine equipment from bosom to pubes, and has the right kind of mauled yet unquenchable innocence...

...When the lovers carry on in bed, Why watches through the keyhole and has sympathetic orgasms...

...The extreme long shots of the girl on the motorbike riding into the dawn along Rhenish forests, I shall keep remembering with a shudder of reverence...

...Chabrol—which explains a thing or two, though not everything) combines the vacuous, far-off gaze of a blind explorer with a surly, pinched delivery of lines as if they were shoes several sizes too small...

...Rush to see Pretty Poison: It has the taste of bitter truth, which once again is proving poison at the box office...

...Les Biches, on whose script Chabrol collaborated with his favorite scenarist, Paul Gegauff (he can be seen playing the piano in Godard's Weekend, and please shoot the pianist), is as stupid, ugly, and mean-spirited a film as you can find this side of Godard and that side of Losey, without even the perquisites those other two may offer...

...At a boring party for the locals, Why meets Paul, an architect, who talks and behaves like a satyr under sedation...

...But the clearest indications of the comedown in tone is that in the novel Daniel buys from Rebecca's bookseller father works by Sweden-borg and Dom Bernard de Montfau-con...

...Then cheerio, old girl...

...There are arcane symbolisms based on the names and nationalities of the characters, and the book is a curious mixture of minute topographical descriptions, motorcycle data, philosophizing, and moderately kinky sex...

...or the atmospheric and picturesque, as in Les bonnes Femmes and The Third Lover...

...The film is fun, and an animated feature that holds the interest of adults of all ages (I don't think there are children of any age left) is not to be sneezed at...

...Indeed, the grave-robberish script digs up such decomposing tropes as "all of us are like lemmings on our way to the cemetery," where the book says "she would always be no more than an object in transit," epitomizing Rebecca's adulterous bike rides...

...The women look interchangeable (interchange-ability being a favorite Chabrolian theme), and you can almost see tubes attached to the heads of all the characters, through which the meaning has been sucked out of them and Chabrol pumped in...

...But this, too, is finally not unmoving...

...And verbally there is the paronomasia: pun upon pun upon pun...

...In Les Biches, a rich, idle young woman, Frederique, picks up a pretty girl named Why, which makes her the eponymous heroine of Chabrol's world...

...and does her in...

...But the film has high directorial style, an efficient script by Lorenzo Semple Jr., atmospheric camera work by David Quaid, and apt performances by Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld...

...One of the male clowns says of the other's painting, "It's shit...

...There are interminable tracking shots of one or two heads in close-up floating against a dreamy landscape to the accompaniment of Debussy-esque music...

...Brilliant ones and appalling ones, all casually flung off and left to fend for themselves as the teaming mind spawns and rushes on...

...The two trolls have been dismissed, and Why becomes the servant-victim of the lovers, both of whom have had and rejected her...

...His humor-lessly snotty dialogue and sultry lower lip prove irresistible to Why, who falls an easy prey...

...Was it because I was a masochist...

...But his people are only mean little puppets jolted hither and yon by a mean little puppeteer...

...It may well be that, pretentious as he is, Chabrol would call his realm Evil and refer to it as Cosmic, which is to say Elemental, Arbitrary, Un-soundable...

...Whereupon Why puts on the dead woman's clothes, lies on her bed, impersonates her on the phone with Paul, whom she summons to her side...

...Pretty Poison is a fine, imperfect, absorbing first film by Noel Black...

...Thus when Frederique torments her in various humiliating ways, Why accepts it calmly...

...There are some shabby effects in The Girl on a Motorcycle, especially when solarization dilutes the wilder sex scenes into psychedelic semiabstrac-tions, but much of the photography is beautiful enough to justify seeing the film, just as a great performance might...

...Her demise, when like a man shot from a cannon she zooms through an oncoming car's windshield, is surely one of the finest visual exit lines on film...

...Visually, every conceivable style is thrown in pell-mell: There is Art Nouveau and psychedelic, op and pop, dada and surrealist, Hieronymus Bosch and just plain bosh...

...Your love disgusts me...

...As their sexual encounters become progressively more sadomasochistic (though they remain within bounds as well as bonds), Daniel initiates Rebecca in varieties of more or less esoteric lore, and teaches her to ride a motorcycle to boot...

...In the interiors, the emphasis has shifted somewhat from the baroquely overdecorated, as in The Cousins, Leda, and Landru...

...Frederique resents the competition and promptly takes over Paul herself...

...As Why, Jacqueline Sassard (the girl in Accident) once again looks cow-eyed and lymphatic as she mopes and pouts through her part...

...the rubber of the tires on which she was riding was a kind of artgum...

...They now strive to be symbolic, with expanses of empty wall space interrupted by isolated, flashy objects: a crazy drawing by Why showing a doe (biche, a term also applied to young girls) in the womb of another doe weeping tears of blood...

...He falls in love with a cherubic high-school drum majorette, and, partly through his infatuation with what proves to be a psychopath, partly through the imbecile hypoctsy of our society, and partly through misplaced magnanimity, ends disastrously...

...Why earns a precarious—and totally implausible—living by drawing chalk pictures on the sidewalks of Paris...

...Based on the novel The Motorcycle by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, a Goncourt Prize-winning pornogra-pher (but a genteel, scholarly, avuncular pornographer of the old school), it turns a quaint, queasy little fiction into a blaring, attitudinizing film...

...Stephane Audran (Mme...

...Why seems to be suffering, but in a Chabrol film it is hard to tell anguish from mild dyspepsia...

...When the lovers go off to Paris again, Why follows Frederique to her town apartment, passionately exhorts her, is rebuffed, and stabs her with her own poisoned dagger...

...You disgust me...

...a poisoned dagger mounted above a large caption, "poisoned dagger...

...More damaging—insofar as the diminution of something already minuscule can be viewed as damaging—is the lessening of the sexual images...

...But worst of all is the pacing...

...But she first became the mistress, under bizarre circumstances, of Daniel, a dominant middle-aged intellectual, who is librarian at the University of Heidelberg...

...The songs are particularly well, because particularly offhandedly, illustrated, and only the filmed appearance of the Beatles at the end proves an anticlimax...

...The novel concerns Rebecca, a young girl married to Raymond, a decent, dull Swiss who teaches in an Alsatian school...

...Why did I marry him...

...but when Frederique writes her an honest letter explaining where things stand, Why sets out to murder her...

...After a trip to Paris, Paul and Frederique settle down at her villa...

...The backgrounds are always glamorously tony and caught by Jean Rabier in varieties of soft focus aspiring to the conditions of pastel...

...the latter, in a rather ambiguous speech, declares herself a virgin...

...The fact that Jugendstil is made to rub curlicues with Miro, that expressionism is obliged to lie down with the Douanier Rousseau, that the outrageous melange des genres is served up as demurely as the most ingenuous tossed salad—in short, that it is so unself-conscious—that's what makes it click...

...Poor as it is, the film has one superb asset: its cinematography...

...an odd objet above Why's bed that looks like a stylized alembic or retort in which a red fluid is brewing...

...Marvelous, too, are shots of the black-leather, mechanized centaur against sleepy towns or soar-ingly sculptured bridges that leave even the antimotor viewer spellbound by the machine's beaute du diable as it striates the works of man and nature...

...she was in the grip of a craving to erase...

...Where the lover in the novel tells the girl he undresses that he is flaying her like a rabbit, here he informs her (and this must be the contribution of Ronald Duncan, the mystic author of This Way to the Tomb), "Your toes are like tombstones...

...The book, moreover, is full of wild metaphors: The motorcycle has "a distinguished drunkard's cough...

...You're a sadist, my darling, a magnificent sadist bastard...

...As a wedding present, her lover gave Rebecca a huge black Harley-Davidson (to motorcycles what Baldwin is to pianos, and fifty times as loud) on which she shuttles between her connubial bed and her lover's brutal caresses...

...in the film, Teilhard de Chardin and Robert Ardrey...

...During one such predawn to early-morning ride from her small Alsatian town to Heidelberg, she recapitulates in her mind the stages of her affair with Daniel...

...Or they all three get drunk together, and Frederique's black-stockinged foot toys with Paul's face under Why's nose...

...The sight gags and sound gags interbreed, until the film stretches before and behind us like a vast punorama...

...What we need is not shown, what we don't need is, often at fatuous length...

...The acting maunders along with the film...

...The relationship of the two women remains unexamined, except that we know Frederique dominates and Why oc-cassionally sulks...

...Roughly one half of Stephane Audran's performance as Frederique consists of wiggling her toes...

...The dialogue is commensurate...

...The script, by Ronald Duncan, an effete religious verse dramatist, and Gillian Freeman, a swinging sociological novelist (she wrote the scenario of The Leather Boys from her own book) is a reduction—as well as a detumescence—of the plot...

...Here Mrs...

...Jack Cardiff (remember the beach scene in his Sons and Lovers...

...a pair of toy anemometers by Frederique and Paul's bed...

...Whereas Godard takes all human knowledge and endeavor for his province, Chabrol's satrapy is the depth of the human soul, which he sounds without the slightest regard for psychology but with a voracious zeal for perversion, for whose logic he shows equal disregard...

...And so on...

...IF Les Biches is like a pornographic film with the porno parts carefully excised and the pre- and postcoital tiresomeness left in, The Girl on a Motorcycle does deliver some sex?otherwise it is almost as bad a film...