Blackened Comedy of Eros

In the 19th century, a Hungarian statesman developed a temporary obsession with chess. He hired a student to play with him for ten hours a day. In the end, the statesman was cured --but the student went mad.

In this century, Vladimir Nabokov, master of fiction and of chess (TIME cover, May 23), operates in somewhat the same manner. The film of one of his early works, Laughter in the Dark, eerily reproduces the commonplaces of experience but gives them an irrational tilt. The viewer who accepts the Nabokovian construction can experience an acute problem of reorientation when he steps from the theater into the world.

Sense Robbery. A placid, pawky art dealer, Sir Edward More (Nicol Williamson) is abruptly seized with an uncontrollable passion. Its object is Margot (Anna Karina), usherette in a London cinema. Gutted by desire, Sir Edward cannot be home with his wife and child for more than a minute before lunging for the doorway and heading back to the moviehouse. There he gropes through a guffawing audience for yet another glimpse of the girl. At last an assignation is arranged, an agreement extracted. In scenes of purest Feydeau farce, Sir Edward pursues Margot in and out of hallways and bedrooms split seconds before his wife's entrance. In the works of Nabokov, however, the demonic world is a mere turn of the page away.

One morning Sir Edward's wife intercepts a telegram from his mistress. From that instant, the farce ascends into a blackened comedy of Eros. The More family is dissolved; Sir Edward and his new lady become a menage `a trois when they are joined by her lover, Herve (Jean-Claude Drouot), who is posing as a homosexual. Together the two take More for all he has--including his senses. When an automobile accident robs Sir Edward of his sight, he becomes pathetically dependent on Margot. Trapped in a Mediterranean villa, he is blindly unaware that the deception has never ceased. Herve tiptoes through the house, eating at the table, sleeping with Margot, giggling silently at More's every blind stumble.

Chart of Evil. The experience is a distortion of Sir Edward's early gropings in the darkened theater. But now the blackout is permanent, and the laughter an echo of hell in which there can be no conclusion without calamity and no denouement without death. As More, Nicol Williamson moves through the film with a looming rage that is Shakespearean in its intensity.* Bathed in such solar glare, the other actors are lit only by reflection. Karina looks and sounds a tart, but she has little of the compelling eroticism that the part requires. At his worst, Herve should convey a quality that is pretty deadly; Drouot's menace lies mainly in a serious case of five o'clock shadow.

Edward Bond's screenplay seems curiously uninformed. Laughter in the Dark is a literalization of the axiom, "Love is blind." Unaccountably, the phrase is omitted from the film. Yet, if the author's scrupulous nuances are vulgarized or lost, some original essence remains. In scores of cruel scenes, Laughter in the Dark is a chart of the banality of evil in which humanity is undone not by a stab in the heart but by a thousand minor slashes to the soul. If for no other reason, the film is worth attention for Williamson's moment of revelation, when a friend informs the sightless and insightless man of the affair-long deceit. Unable to phrase his agonies, Williamson opens his mouth and articulates a wracking shriek that seems to emerge not from his larynx but his marrow. An intellectual howl is a contradiction in terms, but Williamson somehow makes it an embodiment of Nabokov's novel, which is itself an amplification of Prufrock's summing-up of temptation and frailty:

We have lingered in the chambers of

the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed

red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we

drown.

* Williamson is currently starring in a remarkable Hamlet--directed by Tony Richardson--on Broadway. The production will travel to Boston, Berkeley and Los Angeles, beginning June 16.

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