Liza (1972) User Reviews

Good idea, but...

[allenrogerj · 6/10 · 10 December 2006]

La Cagna- The bitch- the Italian title- shows the underlying idea of the film. Liza is on a yacht anchored by an island. She quarrels with her boat-mates, dives in the water and swims ashore. Eventually her friends dump her bags on shore and sail away. Giorgio- an illustrator for comics- is already on the island, with his beloved dog Melampo, and rescues her. They have sex and- after she has rejected the choice of rejoining her friends- Liza returns to Giorgio on the island. The trouble is that Giorgio talks to and shows affection to Melampo, not Liza. So Liza befriends Melampo, takes him swimming and lets him drown. As he buries Melampo, Liza confesses to Giorgio. She puts Melampo's collar round her neck and imitates a dog. Giorgio treats her like his dog.

What next, though? It's a nice idea, but you don't make films with ideas. You could end the film here of course, but it wouldn't be a very long film and there's a lot of time yet to fill in. There's an episode where the French Foreign Legion land and beat up and arrest a deserter and that's all. The story has to expand and leave the island. What actually happens is that we learn a lot about Giorgio and not much about Liza- or anyone else- and what we learn about Giorgio isn't very interesting. He has a very reasonable wife, except for her habit of attempting to kill herself. He has an intellectual friend who drinks a lot. He did a cartoon strip about Spartacus. He has an adolescent son. He has a daughter who eats nothing but carrots and loves her cat the way Giorgio loved Melepampo. Eventually Liza fetches Giorgio. They go back to the island where their boat drifts away in a storm. They don't try to get help and eventually, we must infer, they starve to death. Perhaps the whole film is Giorgio's fantasy. Perhaps it is Liza's fantasy. Undoubtedly, there's a point where the film abandons reality and realism, but we don't know- or care- where. Indeed, one of the problems with "fantastic" directors like Ferreri is that their imagination doesn't go to their camera work. The ideas are fantastic, perhaps, but they are depicted with literal-minded dreariness. Compare Ferreri's use of the camera with Ophuls, Cocteau, Tarkovsky, Scorsese...The imagining is done with when the filming starts.

sun-drenched sub-softcore banality

[oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx · 5/10 · 24 May 2009]

So here we have Marcelo Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve (plus even Michel Piccoli putting in a bit part performance) in a seveties film that has an apparently Robbe-Grillet type plot outline.

Mastroianni plays an artist (Giorgio) who has withdrawn to a desert island (he seems to do stories and illustrations, at one point we see a drawing of his that has been partly watercoloured of a tonsured monk having his way with a large-bosomed, long-haired lady). He lives in a small domed concrete bunker type of building, apparently his refuge from whatever he thinks of 1970s Parisienne society (we don't really find out what these views are, but we know he's not interested).

He's left his wife, son and daughter, and their maid in the Parisienne abode and scooted off with his dog Melampo, whose function is to listen to him, fetch sticks, and the like. The island has a sort of southern Mediterranean/northern African feel to it, it's pretty arid, and at one point some troops from the foreign legion show up to beat a deserter to death (even this is tinged with banality).

Enter Liza (Deneuve), she's on a pleasure cruise on a small yacht with her boyfriend and another couple. She has had a tiff and escapes to the island, boyfriend is not totally fussed about leaving her behind. So she hangs around Giorgio and Melampo. She decides that it would be a good thing to be Giorgio's dog, and so she drowns the dog and goes around wearing the dog's collar. Giorgio takes this pretty much in his stride even though he had been apparently quite attached to the dog. We see his point of view from a doggerel type story he comes up with about a monk who has decided to mortify his flesh and live in the wilderness. The devil comes down in the form of a dog (a bitch) to tempt the monk, the monk has sex with the dog, and some villagers who find out burn both the dog and the monk.

Deneuve just about manages to act like a dog, but it's at this point that we really see how neutered the film is, we never see them have sex, we never see him hit her (although it is implied that he may have), we never see much of the soldier getting beat up. The whole film is accompanied by this saccharine music that you might have found being pumped out around a hotel bar thirty years ago. It's like someone tried to make a movie with teeth, but gave up and just lounged around in the sun a bit shooting the odd scene.

There's no revelatory dialogue, we don't understand Liza's reasons behind wanting to be a dog. Giorgio appears to be little more than an idle burnout who's Crusoeian act is little more than a slow suicide. His some comes to visit at one point, "Why are you in this sort of Pantheon, with your dried fish, your gas lamp? Who do you think you are? A wild man? A survivor?".

He goes back to Paris at one point after news that his wife has tried to commit suicide. He has dinner in their stale apartment, the daughter eats only carrots and has smiles only for the maid, the wife is obviously very emotionally hurt by Giorgio, and yet is utterly non-communicative (in effect an elective mute). Potentially they need a family cell at a mental asylum.

One of the few scenes with any power is when the wife finds out that Giorgio effectively has a human dog. She gets on all fours on the marital bed and in effect is asking Giorgio to treat her like that. I'm sure the feminist film critics would have a field day.

The movie's impotence comes again at the end, Giorgio decides to fly off into the sunset with Liza in an abandoned Mescherschmitt which he has painted pink (wherefore the pink paint, how did he fix the plane with no parts, where does the fuel come from, just one of multiple plot inconsistencies). Ferreri films the plane going down a runway, it's obviously been pushed by the crew down a sloping part of the runway, and the propeller doesn't turn, because they are using a wreck. It's a gob-smackingly cheap movie, all the money must have gone on the stars, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they had all hitch-hiked from the Paris down to the movie set! There's no money for aerial shots and so the island is only ever shown from above by the medium of filming a tourist postcard.

All that I got out of the movie was anomie, indolence and despair. A group of basically self-harming characters with absolutely no purpose or intellectual motivation. It's the kind of film I would have thought a director would have made to leave as a cinematic suicide note. The type of film to watch at midday in the dog days of summer with a bottle of whisky after you have just lost your job, and drift off into a peaceful alcoholic haze

Overdone

[vince-41 · 27 October 1999]

Another Ferreri's fetishistic piece, this time about S&M relationship between man( Mastroanni) and woman (Deneve) which reminds that of Man and dog. Supposedly, the deep insight into the true nature of relationship between men and women. Actually, just like David Cronenberg after him, Ferreri obsessively keeps re-doing same pic over and over.