A cinematic oddity for sure, Arielle Dombasle’s Les
pyramides bleues features half the principal cast of Eric Rohmer’s Pauline
at the Beach (herself, Pascal Greggory, Rosette), but could hardly be more
tonally and narratively distant. She plays Elise, the partner of the wealthy
Alex (Omar Sharif), increasingly uneasy at their decadent life (the breaking
point comes when he randomly fires a gun into the jungle and kills a pet dog)
and eventually fleeing to a convent in France; Alex and his main lieutenant
(Pedro Armendariz Jr.) evolve a convoluted plan to get her back, involving a
new-age religious cult that’s all too ready to compromise its supposed
principles for financial gain. The film contains several gratuitous-seeming
scenes of female nudity, a few times involving Dombasle herself; if there’s any
attempt here to resist the objectification of male-dominated commercial cinema,
it’s sadly hard to detect. But then, almost everything about the film is either
disappointing or mystifying or both (it doesn’t help that one is most likely to
come across the English version, titled Paradise Calling, in which just
about everyone other than Sharif is lifelessly dubbed). For a film that’s notionally
about shifting concepts of faith, it’s relentlessly superficial in probing
everything from the contours of Elise’s beliefs, to the supposed theology of
the cult (which doesn’t seem to go much beyond “God is love”), to Alex’s
seemingly genuine change of heart in the closing stretch (evidenced by his riding
a bus among the common people and enjoying it, and filling a room in the house
with religious icons); the relish with which the cult leader embraces corruption
is more eye-rolling than chilling. And as if all of that wasn’t enough, the
film contains the primary narrative within a clunky framing device closing on
an apparent promise of seduction and a spirited but hardly reflection-aiding
performance of Guantanmera.
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