Eve

"Bloody Welshman!" says Jeanne Moreau to Stanley Baker at the end of Eve, and it's the nearest thing you'll get to a laugh in this bleak but deeply engrossing study of power, sexual psychology and self-destruction, the signature themes of director Joseph Losey at this time.

Set in wintry Venice and Rome (perfectly captured with borrowings from Antonioni's alienating landscapes by cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo), the film tells of an upstart, bestselling novelist of dubious authenticity (Losey favourite Baker), who becomes obsessed with a French high-society call girl (Moreau). Her cynical response is to destroy him and everyone near him - a superbly repellent portrait of vanity and malicious contempt by Moreau, described by David Thomson as "an acid bath for rotting social structures and the man's masochism."

The significance of this welcome theatrical revival of Eve is the attempt by the Netherlands Filmmuseum to restore the film to something close to Losey's own release cut of 135 minutes, hacked to 106 minutes by its hostile producers. That they have almost achieved this (melding archive prints from Italy, France, Scandinavia and the BFI National Film Archive is remarkable, despite the occasional intrusion of ineradicable Finnish and Swedish subtitles.

Clyde Jeavons