Australian Left Review
Article Title
Film Review: ALR 57
Abstract
Private Vices, Public Virtues, Miklos Jancso’s latest film, is such a feast for the senses - vibrant music, rich coloring, warm, frank sensuality - that it comes as something of a shock to realise how tame and even tedious the whole exercise is. You can manufacture a continuing low level of interest in it, of course, by spotting the Jancso trademarks - dialogue so sparse that it tempts you to dismiss the story line outright, visuals so lovingly dwelled upon that you break your brains trying to squeeze as much significance out of the scene as the director obviously does, ritual stripping, the humiliation motif, etc. But such high art gamesmanship soon palls, and you are left with a somewhat dense, but basically centre-less film featuring small doses oi inchoate politics and large doses of curiously sexless sex.