Dome of Humans

So from cop movie to Spaghetti Western, Max arrives on his third outing at a Science Fiction film with 1985's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. By reputation, I expected this film to be the watered down, Hollywood big budget version of Mad Max and I found this somewhat true and yet there is quite a lot to appreciate in its visuals and characters.

It seems like we're in for another Spaghetti Western in the beginning which borrows a crane shot from Sergio Leone to establish Bordertown--starting with a wooden sign to sweep over a bustling crowd like a shot from Leone's Once Upon a Time In the West.

This is one of my favourite sequences in the film as Max--Gibson again with the same weird long hair with really short hair in the middle he'd have in Braveheart--makes his way through the motley tide of merchants and punks into some man-made caverns. There's a real sense of chaotic, strange human existence going on reminiscent of a Terry Gilliam movie but again with the seemingly spontaneous manifestations of high fashion.

Soon Max meets the woman more or less in charge of Bartertown--played by Tina Turner who, with the only American accent in the film, seems slightly out of place but isn't so bad. She rules the town like a stage, involving a lot of strutting and charm. The people call her "Aunty", bringing to mind India and the particular affectionate place "Aunties" hold in Indian culture.

Thunderdome itself proves to be the real weak point of the film. Max picks a fight with Aunty's rival for Bordertown rule--Master Blaster, who is in fact two people; Master (Angelo Rossitto), a little person who rides on the shoulders of Blaster (Paul Larsson), a very big person. Max and Master Blaster settle their dispute in Thunderdome, a community arena designed for the purpose where "Two men enter, one man leaves." I can't imagine many people accepted the sense in how Max's fight with Blaster ends.

It's one of a few moments in the film where rather hazy logic connects one act to another. I won't spoil it for you but suffice to say the next act has Max wandering the desert until he encounters a tribe of children living in a canyon oasis.

The movie's filled with homages, this sequence purportedly borrowing heavily from a novel called Riddley Walker which I've never read, borrowing not only plot elements but names without attribution. It's really puzzling--if directors George Miller and George Ogilvie were going to steal something, you'd think they'd be more discreet about it. But considering the concept was hardly original to Riddley Walker--a tribe whose mythology and dialect have devolved and evolved from familiarity with things of the modern world--Miller and Ogilvie could have easily gotten away with it if they'd just avoided names. Personally, I was reminded of one of my favourite Doctor Who serials, the 1977 story The Face of Evil where the Doctor encounters a primitive tribe called the Sevateem--a corruption of the term "Survey Team", the ancestors of the tribe who'd originally landed on the planet.

Beyond Thunderdome's version is pretty adorable. I liked how they tell their history with a crude facsimile of a television.

The end of the film swings back towards Western with a train chase, an action sequence where the film starts to feel like it has some of the life exhibited in the previous film. It never quite ascends to that level but it does have a lovely sense of a big, strange world.

Roads and the Warriors who Wander Them

Now here's the Max you were probably looking for. 1981's Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior bears little resemblance to its predecessor, more Spaghetti Western than crime film. It's a lot better, too, with a story bound by familiar patterns yet possessed of its own life, the wasteland imagery complimented very nicely by the chaos of improbably stylish survivors.

Max (Gibson again) is the only returning character of the previous film, unless the dog with him is supposed to be the same dog, which seems unlikely since he looks completely different. I wondered if the recent post-apocalyptic Australian film The Rover was partly inspired by the relative indifference Max shows towards his faithful hound in this film.

Soon he encounters a human, a guy with a gyrocopter (Bruce Spence) whose yellow long johns and bright purple scarf making him the first of the film's delightful, wild grown haute couture specimens.

Max takes him prisoner and they hide on a hill where they witness a man being forced to watch the rape of his female companion by a gang of far more flamboyant punk thugs than seen in the first film. This is the first we see of the ubiquitous football padding used as armour.

These guys painted theirs black. The guards in the small community centred around an oil drill and refinery the punks lay siege to painted theirs white, which makes things clear enough.

Recognise her? It took me a moment more because of the eyebrows than the hair but that's Virginia Hey, the talented actress who would go on to play Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan on the television series Farscape. I wish she'd had a bigger role in this movie.

But that's the closest thing I have to a complaint. The roving gangs create a real feeling of menace directed at the vulnerable community and Max, as the outsider western hero, is by no means invincible. A really nicely put together film with terrific action sequences.

Twitter Sonnet #751: Seafood of God Edition

Octopus ordained old bishops held bass.
A Friday obscenity has seized fish.
Piranhas ate meat Eucharist en masse.
Satan's sand dollar bought a flounder dish.
Tridentine bent tiger fish eat fingers.
Ah, knights, a mussel is never Muslim.
Choirs of carp kill their rival singers.
Seminaries sew seaweed in muslin.
Imperial earlobes engaged tuna.
Seahorse dioceses kiss all bubbles.
Infant turtle matins follows Luna.
Sea lion liturgies tell of troubles.
Catfish catechisms contain whiskers.
Porpoise prayers chatter squeals and whispers.

Copper's Turf

Looking for a movie about a dystopia where roving gangs and refugees battle to the death over scarce quantities of oil? Don't look to 1979's Mad Max. Many of the defining aspects of the film series began with the sequel, The Road Warrior. No-one even mentions oil in Mad Max which is more of a combination of rogue cop film and 1950s teen gang film. It indulges in several clichés and the script has some weak points but creative action sequences, an intense performance from a young Mel Gibson, and the basic concept are enough to keep the film interesting.

We're introduced early on to a couple goons peeping on a couple having sex out in the open. The goons are wearing black leather jackets similar to the one Marlon Brando wore in The Wild One and suddenly our perspective is subverted when they receive a call from dispatch and we realise these goons are the cops.

All the cops are dressed like Marlon Brando--minus the hat--and police headquarters looks more like an abandoned warehouse. The gang they're up against look like they were produced by the late 70s punk scene.

But despite this visual dichotomy, there's no real ambiguity about who's who. All the cops want to protect people and stop the bad guys, all the punk bikers want to kill, steal, and rape. Well, one young member of their crew, who's captured briefly by the police, is hesitant to kill.

He's sprung from custody by group of lawyers in one of the film's weaker scenes. Yes, somehow in this future where society has crumbled and justice is a bone of contention between rival gangs, there's a bureaucracy that puts a member of the rival gang back on the streets, a cliché of cop films that sits particularly oddly here. Other clichés, like the murdered partner (Steve Bisley)--who's so obviously marked for death from the beginning of the film he might as well have been wearing a shirt saying, "I'll be dead soon"--whose death makes the hero real mad fit a little more naturally. Though Gibson, instead of vowing violent revenge, decides to quit the force because he's got a wife and child to think of. However, Captain Fifi (Roger Ward), a gregarious man chomping a cigar, is determined to make people believe in heroes again and talks Max into just taking three weeks vacation instead.

What do you suppose happens next, a nice family vacation? Well, so the movie's predictable. But there's a weird personality to the action sequences that's pretty fun--there's a tendency, right before someone dies to cut very quickly to a shot of their eyes bugging out of their skulls. It's not quite cartoonish, more surreal.

Young Mel Gibson as Max is barely containing a fury that might well be racism or anti-Semitism but we the audience can remain blissfully unaware enough to just assume it's a man pushed to the edge by having everything that he holds dear taken away from him. Though I guess that's probably what anti-Semites think the Jews are responsible for. Well, Gibson's crazy eyes are put to better use here.

Game of Parcheesi

Now we have the Empire Strikes Back of Game of Thrones season five. Not in terms of quality, though it wasn't all bad, but in terms of it being a middle act (episode six of a ten episode season) that ends badly for our heroes, such as they are. This being the case, it wouldn't surprise me if this season ended on an abnormally positive note.

Spoilers ahead.

Most people are talking about the end of the episode where Sansa is raped by Ramsay on their wedding night and Theon/Reek is forced to watch. Once again, the show's creators are indulging in the same fantasy rape they've been showing a love for since Daenerys was raped in the first episode, though the rapes of Daenerys and Theon (funny how no-one complains about that latter one) were lingered over with far more affection. I'm not personally into rape fantasy but I recognise what's happening on Game of Thrones as so divorced from the reality of rape I don't look down on Martin, Benioff, and Weiss for their particular kink. Sansa's rape is presented as a far more solemn affair, with sad/horrified strings in the soundtrack by Ramin Djawadi, and we don't actually see the rape, only Theon's horrified reaction which puts emphasis on character pain rather than watching two attractive, well lit actors pretending to have sex. Nevertheless, it wasn't an especially realistic depiction of rape, mainly because there was no-one in the room written like a human being.

The whole Ramsay/Theon relationship has been pure fantasy. Having your dick cut off will not make you a complete willing slave to the man who did it, and a man who'd do that would never expect you would unless he's too divorced from reality to get an accurate psychological impression of other people. Ramsay and Theon are as thoroughly pornographic cardboard characters as the pizza guy who's unexpectedly paid in sex.

And poor Sansa? I had some hopes for her when she dyed her hair black and she appeared to be becoming Littlefinger's apprentice. I don't object to the idea of her failing miserably as a master manipulator but she didn't even try. She's supposed to be trying to wrap Ramsay around her finger and we've never seen her ask him to so much as pass the salt. She just putters around looking shocked all the time, like she's always done. She has a moment of self-assertion when she tells off Myranda for trying to own Sansa's man. Which was kind of nice for a moment but is all kinds of disappointing in retrospect. Sansa the emerging femme fatale is still being written like the naive thirteen year old girl. Maybe the rape is meant to kickstart her conniving, which doesn't make any sense, but then, neither does Reek. Personally, I'm hoping Brienne comes in and slaughters everyone like Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Meanwhile, Tyrion and Jorah are building some nice chemistry. When they discuss their dead fathers it's another nice opportunity to reflect on the show's impressive scope and cohesion. The bit about the cock merchant (though wouldn't that just be someone who sells chickens?) was funny. Is this Tyrion's sarcasm about dwarf cock a couple episodes earlier coming back through the grape vine to haunt him? Great idea, if so.

Also on the subject of chemistry the show needs to focus more on, Jaime and Bronn in Dorne, though the segment also features one of the worst choreographed fight scenes in the series. Though, to be fair, it's hard enough making half naked children wielding knives and a whip look like a threat to armoured men with scimitars without putting those two men in identical outfits. I kept thinking, "Wow, Bronn's getting his ass kicked--oh, that's Jaime" or "Hey, Jaime's doing pretty well--oh, that's Bronn". I did love Bronn at the end good naturedly saying one of the Sand Snakes was "not bad for a little girl" and his laugh when she tried to attack him again. I'm looking forward to seeing these two guys play off Alexander Siddig whose role has been pretty minor up to this point.

But the other celebrated acting powerhouses on the show, Diana Rigg and Jonathan Pryce, had a little more to do in the episode in King's Landing, though sadly, mainly for Pryce, it was largely taken up by a dumb inquest. Olenna trading intimidations with Cersei was great and it'll be fun seeing Rigg's revenge, which I assume is coming, but Pryce's High Sparrow continues to be a sloppy concept. What's with all the soot on his face, for one thing?

Is he a chimney sweep? Puritans and Inquisitors did wash their faces. Once again, the show hazily skips over the vague mass of poor people as no-one stops to wonder why the Sparrows would imprison the supposedly massively popular Queen Margaery who canvassed in the poor neighbourhoods the Sparrows are presumably feeding now. Just a few episodes earlier we heard people in a crowd cheering for their beloved queen. So what's the High Sparrow's purpose in entrapping her? Thanks to Cersei for arming his men? Which would mean he isn't the humble hardliner he claims to be. What's he going to say to people in the soup line now? "You see, she might possibly have lied about having never seen her brother possibly having sex with a man. So naturally she needs to be in prison. Here's your soup."

And, finally, we got back to Arya in the House of Black and White. The idea of training to be a Faceless One requiring a person to really commit to a false story is nice, making the place seem sort of like a deadly actor's workshop. I like all the faces of dead people stored on columns.

Grey Flesh and Locked Jaws

Sunday mornings often put me in the mood to watch Herzog's Nosferatu. Or a production of Parsifal. Something grey and solemnly romantic, anyway. It's certainly been grey around here lately and rainy, too, though I doubt it's been enough to make up for the drought. There's no drought of doubt. Or doubt of drought. Say that five times fast.

I went to the beach a few days ago to see if anything interesting had washed up as it sometimes does after a rain. But there was only a whole lot of kelp. It's funny how often it looks like pieces of rotting animal corpse.

Of course, silent and grey Sundays also remind me of Morrissey but I don't have the Morrissey song on my mind you might expect to-day but rather this one, which came to mind after seeing some of the latest of the frequently, obsessively prescribed social protocol published to the Internet these days:

Twitter Sonnet #750

Pixie stilts have sprinkled powder footsteps.
Competing streets inveigle lanes to walk.
Strident Strider cosplay ripostes the reps.
Broken bowls of noodles saunter and stalk.
Gregarious Gregson Wagners lose roads.
Highways skyrocket on deranged trading.
In electricity are Bob's abodes.
Cooper noodle space is unabiding.
Two itchy bourgeois bowling pins've scratched.
Inclines impeach ill gutter ball rallies.
Topiary ague stopped the cross hatched.
School bags toured bagel purse tallies.
Oblique homburg hors d'oeuvres hobble the head.
Never neglect nebbish nebula dread.

Despots and Dessert

Behold, the frozen Pina Colada Daleks (and TARDISes)! Not even Davros himself dared dream of such a thing and now! Now, I am master of the Pina Colada Daleks!

I've been making popsicles lately using some moulds my parents gave me for my birthday and I had a little more in my blender than could fit in the moulds so I put the rest in a Doctor Who ice cream tray my sister and her husband gave me for Christmas. I use a whole pineapple, cocoanut cream, and orange blossom honey. I think I used to a little too much cocoanut cream this time.

This past week, I listened to the rest of the Excelis audio plays, following the initial Fifth Doctor episode I listened to last week. This is followed by a Sixth Doctor story, a Seventh Doctor story, and then a story that doesn't feature the Doctor starring his sometime companions Bernice Summerfield and Iris Wildthyme. The ones with the Doctor all feature Anthony Stewart Head playing what seem at first to be three different men at three different times in a particular planet's history but early on in the second story it becomes clear that it's all the same man. It's an interesting concept, his first persona, Grayvorne, being a sort of Barbarian warlord and his subsequent personalities being more modern versions of a cruel warrior king--a brutish cop and a tyrant.

The final story has Bernice meeting Iris for the first time in order to finally retrieve the latter's handbag which somehow started the trouble. Benny's a little posh for the blue collar Iris but the two manage to get along amusingly when they discover how much they both love alcohol. Essentially they're both "anti-Doctors" in their own way and it's not hard to see them as predecessors of River Song.

Reading about the Reformation lately, I came inevitably to the subject of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 when Catholics massacred thousands of Protestants in France. Starting with the assassination of Protestant aristocrats at the order of the king's mother it sparked spontaneous violence from Catholic citizens throughout the kingdom who slaughtered their Protestant neighbours for weeks. It's an impressively horrific chapter in history and somehow there was a Doctor Who serial about it, a First Doctor serial no less from the period when the show was probably most regarded as a children's series.

The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve is a lost serial, only audio and stills survive.

The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve (1) by dwrecons

The Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companion Steven (Peter Purves) visit Paris just days before the massacre and find Protestant and Catholic young men baiting each other in a pub. Still, the Doctor doesn't seem quite aware of precisely when he is, cheerfully going off to meet an apothecary who seems to be on the verge of discovery germs.

The story portrays both sides of the religious conflict as being petty and cruel though, while there are several nice men and women among the Protestants, the Catholics are portrayed as uniformly vicious. The story conveniently forgets to mention that the former Queen ordered the assassination of Coligny because the Huguenot admiral had ordered the assassination of her son. Britain's religious affiliation seems like it might partly be responsible for the portrayal of Catholics as villainous in the episode but, then, it's hard to argue when the Catholics really did murder thousands of people.

The Doctor and Steven leave before the actual massacre occurs and the final episode has a scene startlingly reminiscent of newer Doctor Who episodes where Steven angrily confronts the Doctor for not doing something to save more people. When Steven seems like he's going to abandon the Doctor, Hartnell has a rather nice moment where he speaks to himself, lamenting how "they're all gone now" that even his own granddaughter hadn't "understood". If you can't get through a serial made up of only stills, I recommend listening at least to that scene.

Finally, I want to mention how happy I am David Lynch is back on board for Twin Peaks. I guess his earlier announcement really was a negotiating tactic--the guy played hardball and won. David Lynch is an artistic Goliath, I'm glad he's on our side.

The Sex Conference Convenes

It would be nice to think about and have sex all day. The vast majority of us don't have the luxury but we do have 1974's Emmanuelle, the first and most successful of a famous series of French erotic films. A massive box office success in France at the time of its release, the film not only has impressive production values for an erotic film but an extraordinary unselfconscious perspective on sex. It's for the most part a pleasant, mellow fantasy.

Mostly shot on location in Bangkok, the film follows the beautiful young Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) who joins her diplomat husband, Jean (Daniel Sarky), in Thailand to live in an enormous, gorgeous home. A brief, frightening for Emmanuelle, encounter with beggars near the beginning is the only real sign of ugly reality in the film's depiction of the city but the film makes no apology for indulgence in fantasy. The point is to set up a hypothetical reality to enjoy and discuss sex.

Jean's extremely liberal outlook is slightly intimidating for Emmanuelle--he tells her she's not his property and encourages her to have sex with any man or woman she chooses. After sex with two men on the plane to Bangkok, she's still a little reluctant to indulge herself but starts to think she prefers women after a younger woman named Marie-Ange (Christine Boisson) abruptly begins to masturbate in front of Emmanuelle to a picture in a magazine.

Eventually, Emmanuelle finds herself pursuing an archaeologist named Bee who's notorious among the other women for reasons not explained--there seems to be a whole society of lazy, hedonistic and beautiful French women in Bangkok.

The final act of the film is somewhat enigmatic, seeing Emmanuelle meeting with Mario (Alain Cuny), an older man who can't stop talking about sex. As one of Emmanuelle's female lovers explains to her, young people have sex naturally, if a man of Mario's age is still making love, it's poetry.

Most of the thought expressed in the film works more as a prompt to get you to think about sex than it does as actual stimulating philosophy. Mario has a variety of maxims that almost seem to mean something but are really loops back to contemplating how nice it would be to have sex with beautiful people, things like, "Love is an erection, not an orgasm." Compared to the violent or sometimes charmingly awkward sexploitation films of the 70s, the ease with which the actors engage with their subject in Emmanuelle is refreshing--compared to sex scenes in modern film and television, which seem generally rote and chaste by comparison, Emmanuelle is even more refreshing. It's like mellow jazz, though I should point out the soundtrack is mostly stolen from King Crimson's "Lark's Tongue".

Common Land

In a world abundant in resources, why do people still go hungry? It's not a new question but in England of the 1650s people took unprecedented action to rectify the problem. 1975's Winstanley portrays one effort, a radical Protestant, proto-communist society known as "the Diggers". The film is a fascinating, unvarnished look on the simple vulnerability of humanity as one man's attempt to provide an easy solution to an age old problem is frustrated by intractable realities.

Shot on a very low budget, employing teachers as actors and actual historical artefacts for props--including armour from the Tower of London--the film has visual beauty reminiscent of Expressionist silent film combined with a documentary rawness, perhaps the closest thing one could imagine to a motion picture seventeenth century engraving.

Like the Levellers, the Diggers, led by their founder, the pamphleteer Gerrard Winstanley (Miles Halliwell), believed removing the monarchy would bring them closer to a world where everyone had equal right to live. The Diggers decided to actually put it into action, establishing a humble colony on "common land", disregarding the fact that this land was reserved for the farmers living under a lord to graze their cattle.

The Parson (David Bramley) wants to evict the Diggers by any means necessary but Lord Fairfax (Jerome Willis) admires the gentle, good manners of the Diggers. However, he can't stop his tenants from repeatedly raiding the Digger colony. Early in the film, we see the Diggers being released from custody because they'd been captured in an unlawfully violent manner. But there is a basic tension in their continued presence.

Winstanley's argument certainly has its flaws, as pointed out to him by the wife of a neighbouring lord. Haven't the other farmers the right to graze their cattle? Why is Winstanley so opposed to accepting charity? But one admires the basic spirit of what he tried to do, particularly in a world where the divide between the many poor and the few rich is unreasonably broad.

Twitter Sonnet #749

Gaping grey snackcake wrappers speak slowly.
Orange absorbs suns over fruitless nut moons.
Purgatory gulfs option the holy.
God's teeth shod in crumbly stale Lorna Doones.
Exuberant elephant eagles pratfall.
Nobility implants eggplant in mice.
Havarti hazards harry rodent Paul.
Pint epistles perplex small squads of vice.
Reprinted infant earmarks mandate beans.
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Ghosts of gods null offence by any means.
The Ifrit engaged Icarus to sue.
West cricket invoices clamour in space.
Starship allegory lights flintlock taste.

Bee Wing

Here's a dark bee with rather ragged wings now that I look at it from my car last week. Here are a couple lizards looking out for each other from the same day:

That's from my last day at school. Now I can concentrate on reading most of the day--that's what I did almost all day yesterday. I want to finish this 700 page book, The Reformation, by Diarmaid MacCulloch by the end of the week. All I need is time because, like Anne Rice said on her Facebook, where I first heard of the book, it's so well written that reading it is like "eating ice cream". I got a used copy for five dollars off Amazon less than a week ago and I'm already over two hundred pages in. Hours just fly by with this thing mainly, I think, because MacCulloch seems genuinely passionate about his subject. As he chains the influence of Erasmus to Martin Luther and the differences between the men and their differences with Zwingli, the beginnings of the Spanish Inquisition and Spain itself, the Peasant's War--it all seems to have a coherence in his mind rather than stiffly strung together notes. He obviously draws on source material but these people and events are clearly alive in his head.

It's a welcome contrast to a book I read earlier this year, African Vodun by Suzanne Preston Blier which, while informative, feels like it was written by someone who just wanted to get it over with. It reads like a master's thesis by someone whose perspective is dominated by a terror of failure. The seventh chapter, titled "Surface Parergon and the Arts of Suturing" begins with the sentence, "A variety of attachment modes are utilised to secure the diverse extrafigural materials to the surfaces of bocia and bo." Maybe she had a nightmare where she accidentally wrote, "A variety of materials are attached to bocia and bo in various ways." Really, "attachment modes"? It's not hard to figure out what "extrafigural" means but out of curiosity I googled it just now and found that a quote from African Vodun is the fifth result. The whole book's like that. I'm impressed with her thesaurus but it would have been nice to have had this information organised in a logical way. And yet, this is the most useful book I've found so far on the topic of Vodun--people seem reluctant to write about it for some reason. There are a lot of books out of print, too.

Anyway, these are two of the six books I've read so far as research for my next comic. There are five more I want to read after The Reformation but I'm hoping to get started drawing by June, which has somehow worked out to be my traditional starting month for comics. I don't even have a title for it yet. The main characters have been evolving in my head since last summer, changing gradually based on my research and just getting to know them better.

I don't know how many historical figures will be in the comic. Maybe the most fascinating person I've read about so far in The Reformation is John of Leiden, a Dutch Anabaptist leader who took over the German City of Munster for a year. He named himself king and instituted polygamy due to the fact that most of the Anabaptists in Munster were women. If you go to his Wikipedia page, you can see the actual crow's cage his body was placed in after he was tortured and executed by the combined forces of Catholics and Lutherans. So they could agree on something.

The Terrible Opportunity of Simple Pleasure

I'm not sure whether 1982's The Draughtsman's Contract is a post-modernist satire of the way some period films are made or if its the filmmaker's satire of his perception of late seventeenth century English society. The first fiction film by director Peter Greenaway, it's in any case a provoking, studied contrast between artifice and nature.

Set in and around a rural manor house presided over by Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman), the story is centred on Neville (Anthony Higgins), a bold, hedonistic artist whom Mrs. Herbert contracts to draw her home from several vantage points while Mr. Herbert is away. The terms of the contract, demanded by Neville, include private sessions where he may use Mrs. Herbert's person for his pleasure.

Much of the dialogue consists of characters expressing drolly layered observations to one another which, at their bottom layers, usually refer to adulterous ongoing sexual engagements or embarrassing private matters. Some of these come off as third rate Oscar Wilde impressions, some seem oddly pandering, like a scene where one character relates the story of Persephone and Hades, as though anyone in classical Roman and Greek obsessed seventeenth century society would be unaware of the story. It's hard to imagine why Greenaway would make such a contortion for the audience when he has an unexplained nude man roaming the grounds, generally unacknowledged by the characters--only a child seems to think there's anything remarkable about him.

It's not that the adults can't see him, it's just that anything so naked is obviously not worthy of attention.

The artifice both in terms of actual seventeenth century society and in terms of the filmmaking artform is emphasised by the fact that everyone wears only white or black clothing and wigs with the occasional red accent.

According to the Wikipedia entry, a longer cut of the film had deliberate anachronisms like phones and paintings from later art movements. I wondered if this film had any influence on Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

The movie is also sort of a murder mystery, the solution to the murder making more sense thematically than logically. It somewhat recalls The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in its portrait of how a society deals with an ambitious, amoral individual whose schemes just aren't vicious enough.