Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) has been walking about in a haze of grief ever since her 10 year-old daughter drowned five years ago. On the way to visit the child's grave, a strange young woman named Cenci (Mia Farrow) begins following Leonora, eventually explaining that Leonora looks like Cenci's recently deceased mother. Leonora sees a certain resemblance to the woman that her daughter might have grown up to look like in Cenci, and realizing that Cenci has more than a few screws loose, the older woman decides to move into Cenci's opulent home to look after her. The two spend time in a giant bed and a giant bath tub, but Cenci's bizarre behavior continues to get worse, a situation that is exacerbated by the arrival of Cenci's lascivious stepfather Albert (Robert Mitchum).
How a movie this bizarre, one that struggles so much to be outrageous and push the new freedoms of the time in cinema, can still end up being so boring and dull, is a real testament to director Losey. Farrow is going through the wide-eyed, fragile waif period of her career, which is in full effect here. I So I mainly watched this for Mitchum, but even he's pretty terrible, with a shoddy accent that only accentuates the lurid absurdity of his "shocking" discussions of incest or measuring the sexual arousal of hamsters as they watch Jean Harlow movies (No, that's really part of the dialogue!). Turner Classic Movies timed the showing right, playing it as a TCM Underground entry, and I can see this having a fervent, if misguided, cult following thanks to the general silliness of it all. But for me it was just a boring slog of "Ooo, look how naughty we're being!" dialogue and ham-fisted psycho-babble encased in a poorly-acted waste of time. You get a lot of that in 60s movies as film shakes off the shackles of the production code era for good.
How a movie this bizarre, one that struggles so much to be outrageous and push the new freedoms of the time in cinema, can still end up being so boring and dull, is a real testament to director Losey. Farrow is going through the wide-eyed, fragile waif period of her career, which is in full effect here. I So I mainly watched this for Mitchum, but even he's pretty terrible, with a shoddy accent that only accentuates the lurid absurdity of his "shocking" discussions of incest or measuring the sexual arousal of hamsters as they watch Jean Harlow movies (No, that's really part of the dialogue!). Turner Classic Movies timed the showing right, playing it as a TCM Underground entry, and I can see this having a fervent, if misguided, cult following thanks to the general silliness of it all. But for me it was just a boring slog of "Ooo, look how naughty we're being!" dialogue and ham-fisted psycho-babble encased in a poorly-acted waste of time. You get a lot of that in 60s movies as film shakes off the shackles of the production code era for good.