Cinémathèque Québécoise
Identikit
Directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
Credits
Director
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
Writer
Raffaele La Capria, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
Cast
Ian Bannen, Guido Mannari, Elizabeth Taylor
contact
Severin Films
Italy
1974 105 mins
OV Italian/English
Subtitles : English
Genre
Drama
“An unusual and unsettling experience… has the feel of a Fellini movie that has been edited by David Lynch... Taylor is mesmerizing”- THE BOTTLE IMP
“One of Taylor’s single most berserk performances… And since no one can bring the crazy like La Liz, that is really saying something. Why isn’t this cuckoo-pops crazy film better known?”- DANGEROUS MINDS
“Nothing in the good, bad, or so-bad-it’s good canon compares to it… One simply stares at it in stunned disbelief—the purest state of the cinematic what-the-hell?”- SLANT MAGAZINE
World Premiere of Severin Films’ New 4K Restoration!
In what remains the most obscure, bizarre, and wildly misunderstood film of her entire career—and perhaps even ‘70s Italian cinema—producer Franco Rossellini (TEOREMA, CALIGULA) hired director Giuseppe Patroni Griffi (‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE, THE DIVINE NYMPH) and co-screenwriter Raffaele La Capria (CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI) to adapt the unnerving novella by Muriel Spark (The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie) as an Antonioni-esque tour-de-force for cinema icon Elizabeth Taylor. It premiered at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival to stunned silence and has rarely been screened since.
Taylor, who began filming one day after she filed for divorce from Richard Burton, stars as a mentally unbalanced spinster who arrives in Rome to find a city fragmented by leftist violence, autocratic investigation, and her own increasingly unhinged mission to find the ultimate lover and/or murderer. Academy Award nominee Ian Bannen (THE OFFENCE), Mona Washbourne (THE COLLECTOR) and Andy Warhol (in Italy for his productions of FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN/BLOOD FOR DRACULA) co-star in this “unique, hallucinatory neo noir” (Cult Film Freaks), featuring cinematography by three-time Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro (APOCALYPSE NOW, THE LAST EMPEROR) and edited by Franco Arcalli (LAST TANGO IN PARIS, THE NIGHT PORTER), now featuring a new 4K scan from the Rome vault negative. – Gary Hertz
Showings
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