Fleur de vice

The opening is intriguing: a mysterious woman invades the office of a book editor and forces him, at gunpoint, to read her manuscript aloud. Why is this so crucially important to her? The manuscript itself, as we see it playing out on screen, is a surreal erotic fantasy about a young woman who checks into a bizarre, labyrinthine hotel where all the guests and personnel are strange and lustful. As this modern-day Alice-In-Erotic-Wonderland, Clio Goldsmith has a good body but a thoroughly unattractive face - from certain angles, she positively looks like a man in drag. Back at the editor's office, Catherine Spaak and Fernardo Rey are much better - especially Rey, who has a way of making a movie seem better that it is simply because he appears in it. But all through this movie, you're waiting for some kind of revelation, some kind of connection between the "real" and the "fictional" world; it never comes. The ending of "Honey" provokes only a "say what?"/"so what?" reaction, and the whole "reading the manuscript" business turns out to be little more than a pretentious device. Lovely score by Riz Ortolani. (**)