Secret World

Well done, but Bissett is AFAIK orite.

Not a bad story and pretty solid acting from the leads. Overall a little strange, but if one is into older films and especially those with Jacqueline Bisset give this one a watch. The young boy's friends add some pretty good one liners too.

One of the cinematographic Human representation of lives . Are you alive ? with or without secret world of your own? Oh Fakedbook profile.

young Bisset does not perform the usual spice, more of a subdued performance like in her role in ST IVES

Story,actors, and the drama worth watching one more times

A lost gem

This film has several compelling qualities: among them, its setting: it is shot at a lush estate, with environs more wild than cultivated, and there is a mining operation chomping at the edges nearby. Children play and excavate their burgeoning romantic lives at this unmanned mining site. The lushness, beauty, and vulnerability of the estate stand in opposition to the metallic and depressed qualities of the people who live there. This irony is unusually well-handled. The photography itself is lovely, too, with beautiful, impressionistic color schemes and many strong compositions involving foreground objects and long views, like unto a de Chirico interior with an open window. This film is a tricky meditation on loss and desire (a boy has lost his parents, and falls into an obsession with Bisset, the daughter of a friend of his adopted father), and operates more like a dream than a conventional romance. I actually like the weird effect of some of the players (especially the children, who act fairly convincingly, especially for 1970) speaking English with a French accent. What's tricky about the film--and I have only seen it once and thus feel my jury is "out" on the whole--is that no character in the film is really sympathetic; it is a given that the adult men are creepy and competitive, and the surrogate mother is a ghastly bitch to the boy, but her situation is partly explicable by the emotional ineptitude of the men. The characterization of the boy may be realistic, but he is so affectless and kleptomaniacal (he is forever creeping about and stealing small things; his first act in the film is to suck the contents out of a chicken egg stolen from a nest) that a kind of vacuum exists at the film's center. The boy and his adopted family are plainly meant to be a kind of upper-class travesty trembling on the verge of transformation, and this depiction operates near satire. Well and good, but Jacqueline Bisset seems mishandled by the director and make-up people, who try to make her some sort of blonde fairy princess. I can't tell if this is meant as irony or not (even if one didn't know her, she looks "put on"). Blonde and pink suit her about as convincingly as $2 joke glasses and a funny nose would. I find her presentation distracting; but maybe anything so artificial in this film should be mulled over before one rejects it. The music in the film is pretty good stuff on its own, but here I found it jarring. Its horror-show swells anticipate mid-70s films about possessed children, and this kid has troubles, but he's no demon-seed. The music is often bombastically portentous and discordant, while the script and action are dreamy, perplexingly artificial, and ambiguous. If the music is meant to "indicate" the boy's internalization of the "horror" in the family, this is an ultra-melodramatic choice in what is otherwise a fairly impressionistic, low-key film. (For comparison's sake, I imagine that key influences on this film are Antonioni's "Red Desert," with its sublime, dehumanized industrial landscapes as figures of desire and Losey's "Accident," a deliciously grim film about male competition, a princess, and the sub-urban death drive).

Thanks.