Review by Gary Tooze

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• In Praise of Lightness - interview with cast member Pamela Villoresi (19:18)
• Film historian Michael Brooke on Miklós Jancsó (16:34)
• The Last Revolution - interview with writer Giovanna Gagliardo (30:53)
• Trailer (3:00)

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Description: Loosely based on the famous Mayerling Incident, the film is set in a Central European kingdom towards the end of the 19th century. Bored by his very proper wife, the youthful heir to the throne spends his time in amorous dalliances on his sprawling country estate, which operates like a kind of proto hippy commune.

A mysterious Circus of Truth arrives, the champagne is spiked, the party turns wild, and it culminates in death and tragedy. Much misunderstood, the film caused a sensation when it screened at the Cannes film festival in 1976. Today, this overlooked masterpiece of European art cinema can finally be appreciated as one of the most original films of its era. There really is nothing else like it in world cinema. This first Blu-Ray edition, uncut and restored from the original negative, comes with a host of exclusive special features.

 

 

This continues Jancsó's attack on paternalist authority, but its dreamily languorous pace is about all it has in common with its predecessors. Filmed in Italy, it uses the Mayerling story as the basis for a political fable about an act of rebellion: a young prince refuses to bend to his father's will, by staying on his country estate and by debauching the sons and daughters of local landowners to create a scandal in the capital. Apart from the cruel but inevitable pay-off, that's really all that happens, but Jancsó elaborates it into an extraordinary multi-sexual erotic rhapsody, using dancers rather than actors to turn the pastoral drama into something like an Elizabethan masque. The sexual aspect manages to be completely forthright (it centres on the figure of a hermaphrodite) but not at all prurient; as if Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' were the ultimate weapon against patriarchal tyranny.

The Mayerling affair is the essence of the matter, viewed from the vantage of Rabelais, van Haarlem, and the doomed Age of Aquarius carousel. Crown Prince Rudolf (Lajos Balázsovits), heir to the Hapsburg Empire, is introduced ass-first a la Bardot, smoking a cig atop a hayloft in his pastoral estate, a secluded garden and the stage for the unending orgy. His stepsiblings (Pamela Villoresi, Franco Branciaroli) are his chief partners-in-debauchery, Mary (Teresa Ann Savoy) is no baroness but part of the traveling circus troupe; scandal is "the only weapon we have," the swirling nudity of their pansexual romps is a direct affront to Emperor Franz Joseph, whose regime values the rigidity of the military uniform above all. "Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality" (Freud). Released from the machinistic long-take, the bariolage of Miklós Jancsó’s filming is here close to the darkening movement of Ophüls, whose own version of the fable (De Mayerling ŕ Sarajevo) gets a sharp tip o’ the hat in the running photograph gag. The bacchanalia is as choreographed as the maneuvers and skirmishes of The Round-Up or The Red and the White, yet here the circles spill over, overlap and break off, the naked figures that previously embodied humiliation stand for insurrection.

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Mondo Macabro add some good extras - film historian Michael Brooke talks about Miklós Jancsó's films and career for over 16-minutes informing us of the director's substantial reputation. We also get In Praise of Lightness - a 20-minute interview with cast member Pamela Villoresi (English subtitles) and The Last Revolution a 1/2 hour interview with writer Giovanna Gagliardo. There is also a trailer.