Cast overview: | |||
Melina Mercouri | ... | Maria | |
Romy Schneider | ... | Claire | |
Peter Finch | ... | Paul | |
Julián Mateos | ... | Rodrigo Palestra | |
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Isabel María Pérez | ... | Judith |
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Juan Estelrich | ||
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Beatriz Savón | ... | Rodrigo's Wife |
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El Tupe | ... | (as Tupe) |
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Cuatro | ||
Tota Alba | ... | Hotel Manager | |
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Rafael | ||
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Luis Rivera | ||
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Tereza |
Restless married couple Maria and Paul take a road trip through Spain with their friend Claire. While Paul and Claire carry on a clandestine affair, Maria becomes obsessed with a recent murder in a small town along the way. What begins as a vacation ends as a meditation on tragedy and infidelity in screenwriter Marguerite Duras's adaptation of her novella, directed by Jules Dassin. Written by Anonymous
There's not much information available about this film, but it appears to have been shot in English by Jules Dassin, who had directed Melina Mercouri in the international hit, Never On Sunday, and had gone on to make the equally popular Topkapi. This film is a decidedly smaller and artier affair, based as it is on a Marguerite Duras novel. The look of the film is distinctly 60s, and Romy Schneider never looked more beautiful. Mercouri is excellent as an alcoholic who has fallen out of love with her husband (Peter Finch) and tries to find solace by helping a murderer escape from the Spanish police. Much of the action of the film goes unexplained. There is some truly remarkable photography by Gabor Pogany, an otherwise unheralded Hungarian cinematographer who plied his trade in the Italian film industry of the 50s and 60s to little acclaim. His work here is quite revelatory, at times bringing to mind the German expressionism of the teens and twenties. Overall, an abstract delight not a million miles away from Antonioni's Blow-Up.