Eve

The film is set in Venice, in the season that most suits that city (winter), shot in Losey's characteristic baroque style of the period, and features Baker as the upstart Welsh novelist, engaged to an empty marriage but gradually ensnared into an amour fou by the ferocious, loose temptress Eve. Love hardly enters into it; it is corruption by power, money and bad faith that are Losey's obsessions, and they are dwelt upon insistently with more sheerly scathing disaste than he allowed himself subsequently. The film undoubtedly belongs to Moreau who, in one of her finest performances, gives a portrait of terrifying honesty - the heartless self-possession of a woman who does nothing unless for money or whim. The figures of alienation wandering through an elegant landscape may be familiar from the Antonioni trilogy of the period, but the pessimism, energetic misanthropy and disenchantment with the world are all Losey's own. CPea.