The Oberwald Mystery

An oddly misjudged attempt by the master of Italian alienation to film Jean Cocteau's melodramatic play The Eagle Has Two Heads, previously filmed by Cocteau himself (L'Aigle à Deux Têtes, 1948). Ten years after the assassination of her husband Prince Ferdinand, the lonely internal exile of the queen (Vitti) of a middle European country is broken when she gives refuge to a fugitive anarchist poet. Shot on video and transferred to film, this features muddy visuals and suffers badly from the predictable mismatch of Cocteau's flamboyant aestheticism and Antonioni's emotionally distanced formalism.