Slightly more interesting than Peter Emanuel Goldman's previous surviving feature (the overpraised "Echoes of Silence"), this one mixes a bit of Herman Hesse, Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard, with worries that would also appear prominently in the early films of Woody Allen: God, sex, family (or lack of)... For 95 minutes we follow Pierre, the alter ego of director Goldman, through the streets of Paris, meeting everybody from actors Judith Malina and Sean Flynn to sculptor David Medalla, from actress Juliet Berto and jazz poet Ted Joans to guru Swami Ritajananda, after he leaves David (Pierre Besançon), his friend and lover, when the call of women's bodies is too strong to ignore. But soon he also rejects his girlfriend Anka (Katinka Bo, Goldman's wife) and locks himself up in a poky, dirty room, while reflecting on a few steps to achieve spiritual enlightenment. Replacing Laurent Terzieff (who had to turn down the role because of a previous commitment), the "little prince of the counter-culture", Pierre Clémenti, whose presence was always used to suggest something crazy, quirky, dirty or transcendental, is the center of the whole business, but he is not enough to sustain this too-long reflection on untidy isolation in search of interior wisdom.
Review of Wheel of Ashes
