Cinema: Existential Momism

The Empty Canvas is one of those "international" movie projects that appears to have been dreamed up by its principals (during a transatlantic jet flight?) in a spirit of reckless unity. Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia and directed by Italy's Damiano Damiani, the film stars the U.S.'s durable Bette Davis, Germany's Horst Buchholz and Belgium's Catherine Spaak. It is chiefly notable for the fun of watching Davis breast the New Wave plot with bitchy authority.

In a blonde Dutch-boy bob, Bette looks like a degenerate Hans Brinker, and she plays a wealthy old skate who lays out plenty of silver to keep Son Horst from nipping off. She offers him an Austin-Healey, a luxuriantly upholstered housemaid ("or find a nice married woman in your own world"), and cold cash. Horst uses the money to set himself up as a bohemian artist in Rome, but he can't fill his life or his canvas because "there is nothing worth painting." Ultimately, he finds redemption through fleshly enslavement to Catherine, an amoral part-time model and fulltime hetaera who makes him feel love, jealousy and suicidal impulses. This, of course, means that he is alive again.

Stretched too far to be believable, Canvas is the kind of overdrawn foolishness that frequently proves diverting. Its existential blend of sex, symbolism and comedy reaches a bizarre climax when Horst takes Catherine to a party at his mother's villa. In his mother's bedroom, crowning a marriage proposal to the girl whose favors can be had for the price of an espresso, he generously covers her nude body with some of Mama's 10,000-lire banknotes. The door opens. In sails Bette, rococo-eyed, jewels ajangle, a one-woman spectacular. She sees her darling at play, drops into her deep-fried Southern drawl and issues what must be the last word in ultrapermissive Momism: "Please put the money you don't want back in the safe—I don't want the maid to find the room in this curious state."