Reseñas de la crítica

What’s missing [in Duet for Cannibals] is Buñuel’s sensuousness and plunges of abandon: directing for the first time, Sontag cultivates a more literal form of dreaminess than the Spanish master. But her ambition in attempting to work in the same vein as her heroes while on some level sending them up—commingling allusion with intervention, and homage with critique—is impressive.

[Duet for Cannibals] is something of a curio, strangely poised between genres... Nevertheless, Sontag achieved a lot in [the film] – not least a remarkable fusion of emotion and intellect... Duet is full of psychological interest. In many ways, it’s closer to Sontag’s romantic and sexual agonies in her diaries than any of her written fiction. On screen, the abstraction in Duet feels organic, engaging, unforced.

That Sontag took it upon herself to make a superbly secco film without asking permission from the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Lionel Trilling, or Plato—can this bold gesture of Sontag’s (I almost typed “Stonewall” instead of “Sontag”) serve as my model for artistic bravery and jouissance?

“Duet for Cannibals” is a triumph for auteurism — less interesting as a movie than as a movie written and directed by Susan Sontag.

With heady surrealistic interludes, a jumble of languages, and claustrophobic paranoia, Duet is a slow burn curio, pulling in zeitgeist-y themes of the era (sexual mores, revolutionary politics) with the influences and conceptual devices of the era’s arthouse heroes (and Sontag subjects) Bergman and Godard.

[Duet for Cannibals] represents a cross-medium introduction of this theory of sensual liberation into the cinematic bloodstream, antagonizing viewers as a further nudge to lay off the heavy textual lifting. It’s a lesson that may hold even greater relevance today, when the internet allows every inch of any given film to be picked over with a fine-toothed comb.

Duet for Cannibals looks and feels like skimmed milk. An airless, room-locked, unusually adroit drawing-room comedy... What is amazing is how little juice there is in the inventions and characters, yet this grey coagulation keeps going forward in a half-entertaining way.

The situations [in Duet for Cannibals] are original and surprising, funny and even revolting, but they are never shocking or disturbing... [But] if the film lacks the reverberations of an unconscious layer, it does create and sustain a perfect disequilibrium.

"Duet for Cannibals" doesn't seem to owe much to anybody except to Miss Sontag and her own idiomatic, uncluttered sense of the medium... But if the movie fails -- as I think it does -- to open up beyond the strength and the tact of its specific scenes, it invites that failure in the limitations of its own point of view and in its insistence on insoluble mystery to the point where mystery grows boring without getting less mysterious.