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Clip description
At the climax of a striptease given by Lisa (Alyson Best), Charles (Norman Kaye) unexpectedly gets up from his voyeur’s chair, walks briskly outside and heads towards the church across the road.
Curator’s notes
This is the surprising and dramatic climax to the film’s memorable opening scene. Charles Bremer, a wealthy, retired aesthete, weekly pays an attractive young artist’s model to strip accompanied by a climactic section of the Donizetti opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), while he silently watches. Coming at the end of a sequence in which the camera movement is minimal and the takes are long, Charles’s sudden dashing from the room comes as an abrupt, even absurd, interruption – indicating that Charles is an eccentric and perhaps slightly disturbed individual.
Cox sets up the film’s key motifs of flowers, sex, music, beauty, art and religion so that they are inseparable. This is critical to the film’s meaning, since in Charles’s mind, nature and culture are merely two aspects of the same phenomenon.
