Nympho in a Home Movie

Birds in Peru is about as self-indulgent as a movie can get. French Novelist Remain Gary wrote the script and directed the film, with his actress wife Jean Seberg--they are now separated--in the lead. This was his first effort at moviemaking, and it was a terrible mistake. In Birds in Peru, he seems to be sketching out a private fantasy, like the breakfast-table bore who insists on recounting his dreams.

Equipped with some human motivation, a bit of believable dialogue and a more discriminating eye for the bogus, his film might have been a macabre little study of a pretty young nymphomaniac and her rich old sadist of a spouse. As it is, Birds in Peru has most of the defects of a very bad home movie; it is unintentionally funny where it is not flat.

Gary's camera can barely take its eye off Seberg lying naked on a beach at dawn, surrounded by symbolically dead birds and sated, unconscious males; or being caressed by a Lesbian brothel-keeper; or struggling vainly for sexual fulfillment in the bed of a handsome hermit. The scenes are not remotely erotic. This is partly because Seberg is not much of an actress, partly because Gary is not much of a director, and partly because no taint of reality has been permitted to obtrude; whether she is on the beach or in bed, nary a hair of the sleek blonde Seberg head is allowed out of place.

An ancient joke defines a nymphomaniac as a girl who will go to bed with a man right after having her hair done. The director and his star apparently believe it.

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