Cinema: Zita

Age is wasted on the old. Without it, youth is condemned to excess. That's what makes adolescents so saddening and maddening—and adolescence such a groovy movie subject. In Zita, an archetypical French fille named only Annie flits agonizingly between life and death. The daughter of a slain Spanish loyalist, she has sympathy for the world but affection for none of its inhab itants, except her ancient Aunt Zita (Katina Paxinou). One afternoon the girl comes home to find the old lady writhing on the floor. Zita has suffered a stroke, and each gasp edges her closer to the grave.

In a controlled panic, Annie launches herself into the kind of picaresque Parisian tour beloved of Vassar girls in their junior year. Boys woo her, flics pursue her; an older man takes her to a boite. Eventually, she and a cellist make beautiful music together on his pallet. When the sun comes up, Annie returns to bid farewell to her aunt and to her childhood.

Annie is played by Joanna Shimkus, a Canadian who was last misused in the Burtons' bomb Boom! (TIME, May 31). Here, she controls her role with an even poignancy and an odd beauty. Though Paxinou's part is minuscule, her gravitational field exerts enough force to draw every scene toward her. But despite Zita's undoubted appeal to dreamy young girls, an interesting young star and a grand old pro are not enough to support yet another tremulous version of the girl-in-a-woman's-body theme. Director Robert Enrico tries to lend his slender scenario some contemporary relevance by forcibly inserting a variety of fashionable camera techniques and casting a Negro Maoist. Though his color photography begins effectively—notably in Zita's terror-glazed recollections of the Spanish Civil War—it ends by stifling the film in a glut of self-consciousness. Annie's seduction scene, for example, is absurdly overplayed in slow motion. Such sequences may look poetic in the cutting room; in the rhetoric of film they have become the equivalent of purple prose.