After having looked high and low for this to be included in director Chabrol's own retrospective, which I undertook in time for his 80th (and, as it turned out, last) birthday, I finally managed to track down both a French (albeit unsubtitled) and English-language version; for this review, then, I opted to watch the battered latter print (even if it is the shorter, by one minute).
I had heard a lot of negative things about it but, while falling far short of his best efforts, the film is not quite Chabrol's nadir either – as many would have it; on the other hand, it has been likened by some to the work of Luis Bunuel (due to its fantasy/surreal elements which, however, bafflingly draw attention to themselves by being bathed in a soft glow!). Still, the overall treatment is way too farcical to have the desired satirical effect (in fact, this more readily approximates the style of a Fellini or Marco Ferreri!); ultimately, the film's main flaw is the lack of a proper plot – conversely, a definite asset emerges to be Manuel De Sica's score, which is alternately emphatic and wistful but always haunting.
I, for one, was particularly drawn to it by virtue of a star-studded cast; this factor, however, proved misleading since most are given thankless roles: worst of all in this regard were Charles Aznavour as a doctor and Curt Jurgens as a jeweler (incidentally, an uncredited Chabrol even gives himself what amounts to a walk-on part). Typically, the women are numerous and lovely: Stephane Audran (delightful as ever in her last – and most histrionic – leading role for her director husband, showing off her statuesque body despite being 43, and also seen having a romp in a Volkswagen with her legs stretching out of its top!), Sydne Rome (as her impetuous niece), Ann-Margret (as Audran's romantic rival, called Charlie Minerva, involved with both her husband and lover[!]) and Sybil Danning (as Audran's lover's secretary); the odd one out in this company is Maria Schell, who is decidedly embarrassing as a wacky maid: unaccountably developing a hankering for a male doctor, she throws herself out the window in order to be put into his care – later, when the protagonists relocate to the country and her room is destroyed by a torrential downpour, she tells her employers: "You don't need a maid but an exorcist!"
The men in the cast are no less notable: Bruce Dern (as an American poet living in Paris craving a literary prize that eventually goes to a local writer – whose wife Audran fantasizes doing a gratuitous nude scene in a theater and himself imagines having a foursome with Rome, Ann-Margret and Danning, until Audran turns up to castrate his gigantic erection!), Jean-Pierre Cassel (his third and last film with Audran, here playing her lover and Dern's publisher, following Chabrol's own much superior THE BREACH [1970] and Bunuel's masterpiece THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE [1972]) and Tomas Milian (as a Chaplinesque detective, forever having the biscuits he is dunking melt in his coffee, whom Audran appoints to spy on her lover!).
P.S.: An interesting coincidence relating to Dern and TWIST is that, in the same year, he starred in a film by Alfred Hitchcock i.e. FAMILY PLOT (1976) and this, made by his French counterpart Chabrol (not to mention the co-author of the first-ever critical study on the Master Of Suspense's work)!
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