Camille 2000: Metzger's Op-Art Update of the Classic

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 12:00:00 +0000

There is a scene in Camille 2000 set inside a room whose walls, floor and furniture are made of transparent inflated plastic, where the characters recline on cushions of air and the whole environment wobbles gently as they move, and it tells you everything about what Radley Metzger was attempting in 1969. He had taken one of the most cried-over stories in Western literature — Alexandre Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camélias, the doomed courtesan who dies of consumption, the source of Verdi’s La Traviata and a hundred stage weepies — and reset it among the jet set of contemporary Rome, then poured it into production design so aggressively of-its-moment that the film now plays as a time capsule of high-1960s style. It is the most visually excessive thing Metzger ever made, and the excess is the argument.

Camille 2000 - vo.rs

Camille 2000: Metzger's Op-Art Update of the Classic