Orpheus Now

The lines are from Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

The story is from the legend of Orpheus. Nicholas Urfe (Michael Caine), an overread, underbred London dropout, accepts a teaching job on a Greek island. In Caine's adroit impersonation, Urfe explores sensuality from Alfie to Zeta, but along the way he stumbles into a labyrinthine underworld presided over by an occult genius--The Magus. His journey begins one day when he finds a book of poems open to the lines from Little Gidding. They are to become the theme of his life.

The book's owner, Maurice Conchis (Anthony Quinn) befriends Urfe and brings him into his vortical universe. Conchis possesses many strange items: a schizoid mistress, Lily (Candice Bergen), limitless wealth, a haunted villa full of perceptible ghosts and fauns and figures. He also proudly exhibits his own grave, whose tombstone reads, "Death is a Lie."

Metatheatrical Master. Death is not all that is false. Conchis can re-create portions of his life at will. Nazi soldiers emerge from the forest; Greek villagers dead for over 20 years reappear; Urfe's girl (Anna Karina), a suicide, comes to life. Angry and bewildered, Urfe cannot penetrate his host's series of masques. Is Conchis a wizard who can make people materialize from his mind? Is he only a psychiatrist, trying to bring Lily back to sanity by enacting her fantasies in life? Is he a master of metatheater, in which everyone must play a part? Or is he God? Although Urfe comes to fear for his mind, he cannot leave the island. "It's like being halfway through a book," he says, driven to follow the maze to its end regardless of twists and turns.

So is the viewer. Author John Fowles, adapting his open-end puzzle of a book, cuts away much of its elegance; but he retains the oscillation between illusion and reality and maintains the mystery to the final frame. Director Guy Green wastes footage on tepid erotic interludes, and some of his Grecian tableaux smack of spring pageants at Vassar. Still, he has a strong sense of place, and he uses the azure skies and limpid Mediterranean to give the story the cast of eternity and overtones of legend-in-the-making. In the final hallucinatory segment, he makes the screen a place of brilliant anguish, when time present and time past mix like ouzo and water until neither is what it was.

Quinn is surprisingly effective at making Conchis a cross between Picasso and a monkey, as he was in the novel. In a part that calls for relentless coyness, Candice Bergen cannot be said to act, but her beauty is so compelling that the male audience, like Orpheus, can hardly be blamed for forsaking the future for a backward glance.

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