Duett for Kannibaler
USA
, 105 min
Shown in 1969
CREDITS
- dir
-
Susan Sontag
- scr
-
Susan Sontag
- cam
-
Lars Swanberg
- cast
-
Lars Ekborg, Adriana Asti, Gosta Ekman, Agnetta Ekmanner
- prod co
-
Sandrews, Stockholm
- source
-
Grove Press, Inc.
-
COMMENTS
Susan Sontag in person.
OTHER
Already widely known and admired as an essayist and novelist, (The Benefactor, Death Kit), Susan Sontag's career has suddenly turned toward film writing and directing. This fortuitous occurrence proves several things—that the day of the emancipated woman artist has finally arrived; that it is possible for one to move effortlessly from a love for literature to a creation of films, and finally, that the world of cinema is so international that one can make a first feature in another country, in a different language and still manage to successfully accomplish one's original intention. It seems really quite natural for film critics to eventually make films, and Miss Sontag's debut work, Duet for Cannibals probes the psychological sub-depths of an intellectual marriage and its effect upon two young lovers. A political scientist, Professor Bauer lives in exile in Sweden with his Italian wife, Francesca. He hires a clever student, Tomas, as a private secretary in order to prepare his voluminous notes for a book that he intends to publish. In addition to his secretarial duties, Tomas is asked to provide companionship for Francesca, a request that hints at erotic services—hints not altogether dispelled by the wife's flirtatiousness. However, it is only when Tomas's attractive girlfriend, Ingrid, attempts to persuade Tomas to resign his position, that the older couple enlarge the scope of the convoluted charade of their marriage in order to engulf and devour the younger couple with psychopathic abuses. Here is a difficult disturbing exercise, with its own philosophical denunciations of marriage intact, but beyond that, there is mostly Susan Sontag's brilliant excitement with her strange story and the challenges to herself, facing a new art form: hypnotizing, direct and real.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #10
In 1960, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which has inspired many women to jump into fountains, was pulled from the San Francisco International Film Festival’s program by the distributor and replaced with Roberto Rossellini’s Night over Rome.
