This is a film where you can palpably detect the director’s concerted effort at trying to be avant garde. The set-ups frequently defy belief – Ottinger loves operas, she stages two of them – one is a nominally classical piece but staged on a beach framed by curtains and wings, with the audience seated in a cave encased by drapes that flow all the way down the beach and the characters dressed in plastic macs and with New Wave hairstyles and kitchen cutlery used as armour; the other a lunatic kabuki of leftover Mikado chorus-liners seemingly let loose on a Yoko Ono repertoire. Bizarre non-sequitirs are everywhere – Veruschka is chauffeur-driven about by a dog; a party is held in room that is entirely papered in newspapers, including the lapels of the waiters. The hero is played not too convincingly (not that it matters) by a woman. Seyrig is decked out in what might be termed stiletto lapels that she seems in imminent danger of being about to do herself an injury on, while her dialogue is equally divided between German, French and English. Ottinger quotes from Germany cinematic history by naming characters Dr Mabuse and the Golem, as well as a Dorian Gray, to no particularly clear point.

It’s alternate, but is it art? Ottinger set-ups are lengthy and static and after 2½ hours of these rambling set-pieces and not the remotest resemblance of a plot (it could be a series of filmed still-lifes for all the enervation the film has), the majority of the audience at this screening had walked out. Outside of Ottinger’s wilful bizarreness there is not really much to the film – there is a slim plot, which is frequently abandoned, and its only real message seems to be to wheel out histrionic outrage at the gutter press, something that seems too easy a target and with Ottinger having nothing new to say about it.