Adapted from Cocteau's drama, “The Two-Headed Eagle,” Michelangelo Antonioni's latest film (shot in video and transferred to film) is the story of a queen, her king, a poet - treachery and murder in an unidentified kingdom (though Cocteau's king and queen vaguely resemble Louis II of Bavaria, and Empress Elizabeth of Austria...). Antonioni offers some insight into this romantic, radical departure from his earlier films, with their arid, problematical, and analytical approach to modern society:
“Why such a choice?.... One could joke about this, and say that the ‘mystery' stands for why I made the film.... Let us say that I did my best to soften the blow.
“First of all I disengaged the story from all historical connections by moving it up in time. The costumes bear witness to this. It happens in 1903.... Secondly, I changed the dialogue... and removed the emphasis with which Cocteau had padded it. Basically, I placed myself before the subject in a detached and respectful attitude, while at the same time trying to maintain my directorial nature. I trust that at least here and there a vibration or two of this nature can be felt....
“Cocteau... is brilliant, but limited: far from modern literary tastes. Yet a certain feeling of our times does run through the text.... Words like anarchist, opposition, power, Head of Police, comrade, group, all belong to our everyday vocabulary. True, the final solution of the events is as romantic as could be, but this belongs to the stylization and formalization of the melodramatic genre, to which Cocteau wished to remain faithful.
“My detachment was therefore fully justified. But this justification carries with it... a confession....: What a relief to escape from the moral and aesthetic commitment, the obsessive need to express oneself. Like recovering a lost childhood.
“But there is yet more to it. Years after I first started thinking of it, I finally made a film with telecameras. You can also obtain special effects that are impossible in normal film-making. Yet you soon realize it is not a game at all, but a new way of making films. Not television, but cinematography. A new way of finally using colour as a narrative, poetic, medium.... Television is colour.”