Daddy

Abstract

Daddy Molly Haskell (bio) Seasoned with Oedipal Sin—Daddy Review, Village Voice, 1973 I know there are a great number of people, among them some of my best friends, who live in perfect harmony with their libidos, like a man and his dog. They (the libidos) sit, unleashed, by their mistress's side, never misbehaving, asking only for a regular outing where they frisk up but never stray too far afield. These are the lucky women who somehow managed to escape the scars of sexual repression. They took to the whole business like a duck takes to water—they have glowingly healthy sex lives (although they don't look any different from you or me), they bounce around on water beds, make it in taxi cabs, and indulge in a little spouse-swapping at the drop of an after-dinner hint. But I tend to be of the order indicated by Luis Bunuel, who was quoted by Carlos Fuentes in his excellent recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine Section as saying, "Sexual plea sure for me is directly linked with the idea of sin and only exists in a religious context." We don't have to light candles on Saints' days to feel the permanent guilt of sexual transgression. And the sense of sin associated with Oedipal desire may be the most powerful source of eroticism there is. It is in the memory-mold of a Catholic girlhood and a lecherously hovering Daddy-figure that English sculptress Niki de St. Phalle, in conjunction with director Peter Whitehead, casts her first film. "DADDY," which may turn out to be the most controversial of the New Directors Series at the Museum of Modern Art (although advance rumors that "Men hate it, women love it" always make me want to join the other team) is a three-part fantasy in which Niki de St. Phalle as Agnes I, and the two girls who play the snaggle-tooth [End Page 610] moppet Agnes II and the convent-chaste Lolita Agnes III, expose, abuse, tantalize, torture, and finally fling their collective arms around the memory of a father who in life alternated between indifference to and lust for his daughter, but who has finally shaped her emotional pattern as inalterably as Fate. I have made the film sound conceptually coherent whereas it is actually something more and less—a wildly uneven succession of images, of black-and-white and color photography, cartoons, collage, sculpture, action desecration, destructivist art, charades and masquerades, with a look that falls between avant-garde de cadence and soft-core pornography. Titillating passages alternate with dull, plodding ones; terrible dialogue contrasts with occasional electrifying images, and poor acting with provocative ideas. Its cavalierly pursued structure is a progression or—depending on how you look at—retrogression from child to adult. In the first section, the attempt to exorcise the father by envisioning him as a kind of comic Count Dracula in a combination high-school play horror film doesn't work on any level. The foppish German father becomes an unequal match for the girl (at one point she almost succeeds in killing him by kicking him down the steps to see if his blind man's bluff is just a bluff) in a stylized mini-film whose point of view is that of neither the frightened child nor the ironic adult, but seems rather to emanate from the sexual and artistic no man's land of adolescence. The second, where she actually caters to the prurient fantasies of the father (bound in a wheelchair) is ironically the most effective. First (or, as they kept saying on the Academy Awards, firstly) Agnes I has adolescent Agnes shimmy and slowly remove her schoolgirl frock in front of an altar, the centerpiece of a church that is actually a bar, with mirror-top tables and leering playboys. Then she instructs her in the arts of seduction and feigned orgasm. (This provides the occasion of the film's one great line: after the child has given a most convincing display of autoeroticism and ecstasy, her mentor tells her, "You'll make a great actress." "No, I won't," she replies, "I...