This is like some crazed version of the Salinger family of cognoscenti in Franny and Zooey; all members destroyed and genius blighted by the neurotic legacy of the mother's will to survive the KZ experience in 1945. Bisset plays the mother who suffered the Sophie's Choice of seducing her executioner-doctor with sado-masochistic sexual rompings in order to survive and make a family in New york with two sons both of whom are dripping with potential but who have had their genius crushed by her wild and uncontained rages. The provider father is a shadow of a man who cannot control his wife's mental devolution nor his sons' actual contempt for him.
With stilted monologues and dialogues their raisons d'etre paint them as hollow people pretending to cope with a meaningless set of unhappy lives.
The one shocking curiosity is that the end of the film houses a prolonged scream of orgasmic satisfaction which stems from the aged mother now visited again by her Camp doctor as she is finally set free of her morbid longings with a wholehearted indulgence in what she has missed all these years. Out of a Mephistophelian debacle comes a renaissance of the evil promise; all the evil caused by her moral turpitude is 'excused' with this one long drawn-out scream of sexual satisfaction. Worth a watch if only for the daring moral tightrope walking ...
With stilted monologues and dialogues their raisons d'etre paint them as hollow people pretending to cope with a meaningless set of unhappy lives.
The one shocking curiosity is that the end of the film houses a prolonged scream of orgasmic satisfaction which stems from the aged mother now visited again by her Camp doctor as she is finally set free of her morbid longings with a wholehearted indulgence in what she has missed all these years. Out of a Mephistophelian debacle comes a renaissance of the evil promise; all the evil caused by her moral turpitude is 'excused' with this one long drawn-out scream of sexual satisfaction. Worth a watch if only for the daring moral tightrope walking ...