Review of Frantic (1988) by Jacob N — 29 Oct 2007

I am obsessed with a certain look in a woman's eyes. Emmanuelle Signor looks out from behind these eyes in this movie. Dependance, faith, wisdom, waiting, alertness, passion, and reserve--I am obsessed with this look.

Natasha McElhone has the look in her eyes here in Solaris. Her expression is blank and yet undulating with passion beneath the surface, much as the surface of Solaris or the surface of the sun in SOHO clips.

These are the same eyes that looked at me while reading Andre Bretton's Nadja and caused me to fall in love with her--a woman with no corporeal existence. They are the eyes with which my wife looked at me on Santorini.

One look and I was completely obsessed with her. I was in love as soon as I saw her eyes because I had loved and known them for so long. It is as though some archetypal goddess lived behind one set of eyes and has appeared to me in many guises.

I know what lies behind these eyes as though I had known her before I was born. I saw my wife walk by. I idly stopped her because I wanted to hang out with a woman on the island that night and she was good looking.

She stopped and looked out over the cliff at the sea. I was only half paying attention and was curious as to whether she would stop to talk or continue on her way. She turned and looked at me and I was transfixed, even shocked, and utterly obsessed.

I was thrilled as when I first heard the faint and distant drumming in the hills right before Euripedes's Maenads went on their ecstatic rampage to tear Pentheus to pieces. "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken; / Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes / He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise - / Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

" I knew everything about her and was in love with her instantly. I had a vision, in those few seconds that I looked into her eyes. And nothing my wife has ever done since has been inconsistent with that vision.