It’s peak 70s Liz Taylor in this arrestingly bizarre movie which is being released in the UK for the first time; it was directed by Italian film-maker Giuseppe Patroni Griffi in 1974, which he co-adapted from the 1970 novella by Muriel Spark and was issued under the title Identikit in Italy. With her big sunglasses and permanently dishevelled jet-black hair, Taylor gives an intense and more-than-slightly alarming performance in a preposterous, slightly dated yet very watchable psycho-existential mystery, a cousin to the era’s paranoid thrillers. It was shot by Vittorio Storaro, who repeatedly directs light sources into the camera so that the figures often move like shadows behind a disconcerting glow, which is part of the film’s distinctive puzzle.
Taylor plays Lise, a single woman of a certain age who is clearly on the verge of a breakdown. Lise lives in Hamburg, where she is seen buying oddly garish, multicoloured clothes in a department store, high-handedly terrorising the sales assistants and announcing that these garments are appropriate for the warm, southern climes to which she says she is heading. We first see Lise drifting through a surreal department filled with naked mannequins; perhaps The Driver’s Seat has been an influence on Peter Strickland.
On the plane and in the city itself, she has deeply strange, fraught encounters with men, most of whom want to have sex with her, such as the creepy businessman and macrobiotic diet enthusiast Bill, played by Ian Bannen – the pan right on the plane to reveal his grinning face is one of the film’s most disquieting moments. There is also garage mechanic Carlo (Guido Mannari), who rescues Lise in Rome after she is dazed and traumatised by witnessing a car bomb assassination attempt in the streets; another deeply dreamlike and unsettling set piece.
Lise befriends a ditsy old lady, Mrs Fiedke (Mona Washbourne), but seems impatiently keen to ditch her. She also has an encounter with a distrait English aristocrat; this is an extraordinary cameo from Andy Warhol (who of course created the iconic silkscreen portrait of Taylor in 1963). But her closest connection seems to be with the sensitive, nervous Pierre (Maxence Mailfort) who was freaked out by her predatory behaviour on the plane and whom she urgently tracks down. Lise needs a man: not to make love to her, but to murder her, a bizarre thanatotic urge underscored by strident flashforward episodes in which police are shown interrogating everyone involved.
Maybe a contemporary audience will not be persuaded by this central conceit, in the way Martin Amis found some female readers unconvinced by his “murderee” trope in London Fields. But Taylor herself sells it with an authentically mad-seeming performance, a sort of quasi-Blanche DuBois turn from a star who was in 1974 perhaps not entirely reconciled to this phase of her career. Her character never really seems to know who she is talking to or why; and Taylor’s portrayal is hammy but somehow very subtle. The scene in which she is queuing at the airport check-in and seems to be zoning out while the man behind the desk asks her questions is really fascinating. Despite the title, and despite the scene in which she boldly escapes a rape attempt, Lise is not in the driver’s seat; someone or something else is guiding her life and fate.
• The Driver’s Seat (AKA Identikit) is on digital platforms and Blu-Ray from 26 June.
