Opens with a sexologist talking to us from his office, then flashes of sex-oriented drawings amidst the credits, finally easing us into the story of the switchboard operator. She’s stalked at work by an annoying messenger, starts dating a sanitation worker. But we know how this will end, because documentary-style scenes keep cutting in, of the police finding her body in a water tower, and her autopsy. She gets pregnant, is unhappy with her situation with the exterminator, he finally kills her, as we know he will.

Makavejev made this a few years before Mysteries of the Organism, and I’m pretty sure I liked this one better, though I’m no huge fan of either.

Criterion:

Despite such genre-flouting contradictions, Makavejev’s mix-and-match aesthetic creates visual and thematic harmony rather than Dadaist discord. In the most memorable sequence, a lovely shot of Izabela’s bare buttocks is graphically matched to eggs and then a mound of flour, into which a yolk is dropped, followed by images of hands mixing and kneading strudel pastry, all set to Verdi.

Film Quarterly:

We soon become aware of his fascination with the mythology of society, a mythology expressed through media and technology. Makavejev uses the images of mass culture as background for a straightforward story about two luckless people. The film illustrates McLuhan’s idea that man becomes the reproductive organ of the technological world.

N. Power:

[Isabella] smilingly telling him to come through to the bedroom because “there’s a good program on television.” It turns out to be Vertov’s 1931 Enthusiasm, specifically the scenes of churches being toppled by the crowds which are themselves taken from Esther Shub’s The Fall of the Romanovs. Thus we have a fictional couple watching a documentary within a documentary as a form of seduction: the cinematically informed viewer is thus seduced three times over. “It’s more intimate” this way, Isabella suggests, resting her head on Ahmed’s shoulder as they watch Vertov.