What?

aka Che? Italy/France/W Germany 1972, d Roman Polanski

Polanski's most obscure film was made quickly and cheaply shortly after completing Macbeth. Set in a sprawling Mediterranean villa (owned in real life by producer Carlo Ponti), accessible only by birdcage-shaped cable car, ingenuous American hitch-hiker Nancy (Sydne Rome) encounters jaded millionaire Joseph Noblart (Hugh Griffith) and his nephew Alex (Marcello Mastroianni), a former pimp.

While waiting for an afternoon assignation with the latter, Nancy meets the villa's other equally peculiar residents and discovers a whole gamut of obsessions ranging from lesbianism to the fetishising of harpoon guns to a desire to paint one of her legs blue. At her rendezvous with the impotent, possibly gay Alex, Nancy turns him on to sado-masochism in a relationship that recalls George and Teresa's in Cul-de-sac.

There's a strong hint of both Lewis Carroll and Luis Buñuel in its presentation of a mad world where conventional rules have been upended, and some of it is very funny, especially when Polanski falls back on familiar comedy-of-embarrassment staples.