Directed by Nicholas Roeg (1980), this film interplays a police investigation with a marital affair that boils into a toxic stew, all in lovely Vienna, with a side trip to Morrocco. It begins with an unconscious Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell) being whisked off in an ambulance with a concerned Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) at her side. While she’s in the emergency room receiving urgent care, Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel) begins his investigation into her suicide attempt.
The investigation crosscuts throughout the film with the inception of the marital affair to its melodramatic and harrowing climax, sometimes to a dizzying degree, creating the illusion of Inspector Netusil witnessing in real-time heated and disturbing moments of the affair.
Apparently, Roeg discovered this way of telling the story in the editing room. The overall effect is brilliant, heightening the transitions between various scenes with great intensity, as when Milena is receiving a graphic tracheotomy under the bright lights of the emergency room crosscut with an impassioned sex scene between her and Alex. (A technique Roeg also used in Don’t Look Now [1973] in a sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.) Roeg was a pioneer when it came to jarring methods of splicing the chronology of the story to converge in certain scenes and transitions, and was most likely a huge influence on Christopher Nolan and Gasper Noe, and many other directors.
Alex Linden is a research psychoanalyst. In an early scene, during a college lecture on secrecy and spying, he presents his students with a slide show of the first spy, a young and curious boy, and then another slide of the first to be spied on, two adults in a naked embrace. Then there are slides of famous spies and political voyeurs. A student asks if this means we’re all spies. Dr. Linden answers by saying he prefers to think of himself as an observer.
There is a dose of unexplained espionage. Dr. Linden is brought in on a rush-job to evaluate secret files for the military, astonished to see the files are on Milena and her husband in Bratislava. This is as far as we track the case. Yet, it instills a duplicity in Alex and Milena’s relationship that echoes throughout the film of the spy and being spied upon.
Alex Linden develops strong feelings for Milena, who prefers a casual relationship. He becomes increasingly obsessed with her, observing her from afar with other men, or stumbling home drunk and alone at odd hours. The soundtrack is as eclectic as one might imagine Milena’s sex life: Tom Waits, Billy Holiday, Keith Jarret, Harry Partch, Bachir Attar, The Who …
Who are you is in a sense a refrain throughout the film. In Milena’s apartment, both Dr. Linden and Inspector Netusil handle at various times a framed picture of a maze. There’s much about Milena that will remain an enigma. It’s what ultimately sours the relationship between her and Alex, who becomes increasingly jealous of her other affairs.
When he asks her to marry him in Morocco, she respectively declines, wanting to know why what they have in the moment isn’t enough. It’s evident it’ll never be enough for Dr. Linden. They break up with her repeatedly drunk-dialing him while he repeatedly stalks her. The two are never able to repair the relationship. There’s something real to the fury captured here that for anyone who’s been in a toxic relationship will regrettably recognize.
It all hurtles toward a cringy dramatization of Swiss artist Henry Fuseli’s oil painting The Nightmare (1781), with Dr. Linden as the ogre-like incubus crouched on an unconscious Milena with Inspector Netusil as the blind horse seeing the depravity to come.
According to Nicolas Roeg, someone from The Rank Organisation, a prestigious film company in the United Kingdom, said, “It’s a sick film made by sick people for sick people.” Roeg thought this was a brilliant statement and very, very accurate.
Vienna is the birthplace of psychoanalysis. What is this film saying about the profession by showing us a research psychoanalyst who becomes a deviant creep? Sigmund Freud smoked three cigars a day and famously said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Freud died of oral cancer. Dr. Linden is a chain smoker, so is Inspector Netusil, so is Milena Flaherty; it’s possible there was some smoke billowing on-screen from the camera crew and the director in a couple of scenes. The amount of second hand smoke in this film is deadly.
Demented Flicks 