No one emerges with credit from Jules Dassin’s last film Circle
of Two, a thoroughly artificial and disengaged concoction that almost makes
one wish the director had found a way to work in his wife, the reliably
unwatchable but at least lively Melina Mercouri. Fifteen-year-old Sarah (Tatum
O’Neal) sneaks into a porno theatre, where artist Ashley St. Clair (Richard
Burton) is asleep in the row in front of her: they briefly register each other
when the film ends, and then meet again in a café, but it’s typical of the
film’s superficiality that his seemingly out-of-character presence in such a location
is never even casually probed. She visits him at his studio, and then again, and
they rapidly gravitate to being physically affectionate while out and about
together; he never makes a sexual move on her though, and indeed explodes in
anger when she takes off her clothes for him (although that’s to offer herself
as a subject for a painting, not a conquest). Even so, the relationship becomes
all-consuming (a reedited version of the film was released under the title Obsession),
with Sarah refusing to eat when her parents prevent her from seeing Ashley; it’s
all psychologically and behaviourally incoherent though, with Burton at his most
offputtingly stiff throughout, and O’Neal generally seeming to be reciting
lines she barely comprehends. The film hints at unhealthy family dynamics (Sarah
recoils from her mother trying to dress like her, and is justly surprised one
morning to find that the overly controlling boyfriend she dumped has been
invited over for breakfast) but even these frail points of interest come to
nothing, and things ultimately end as abruptly and incomprehensibly as they
began. The script’s poverty of imagination includes a dopey fixation on Gone
with the Wind, cited twice as a reference point for Ashley’s name, and
elsewhere in speculating on the length of the porn flick.
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