Cinema: Nympho in a Home Movie

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Birds in Peru is about as self-indulgent as a movie can get. French Novelist Remain Gary wrote the script and directed the film, with his actress wife Jean Seberg—they are now separated—in the lead. This was his first effort at moviemaking, and it was a terrible mistake. In Birds in Peru, he seems to be sketching out a private fantasy, like the breakfast-table bore who insists on recounting his dreams.

Equipped with some human motivation, a bit of believable dialogue and a more discriminating eye for the bogus, his film might have been a macabre little study of a pretty young nymphomaniac and her rich old sadist of a spouse. As it is, Birds in Peru has most of the defects of a very bad home movie; it is unintentionally funny where it is not flat.

Gary's camera can barely take its eye off Seberg lying naked on a beach at dawn, surrounded by symbolically dead birds and sated, unconscious males; or being caressed by a Lesbian brothel-keeper; or struggling vainly for sexual fulfillment in the bed of a handsome hermit. The scenes are not remotely erotic. This is partly because Seberg is not much of an actress, partly because Gary is not much of a director, and partly because no taint of reality has been permitted to obtrude; whether she is on the beach or in bed, nary a hair of the sleek blonde Seberg head is allowed out of place.

An ancient joke defines a nymphomaniac as a girl who will go to bed with a man right after having her hair done. The director and his star apparently believe it.