The always lovely and captivating Charlotte Rampling gives one of her warmest and most appealing performances to date as the elegant, bored stiff wife of bland stuffed shirt diplomat Anthony Higgins. Rampling has an extramarital affair with Max (Ailsa Berk in an amazingly convincing Rick Baker simian outfit), a moody, ill-tempered, but very adorable, affectionate and even amorous chimpanzee. Higgins discovers Rampling's infidelity and decides to allow Max to move into his posh Paris apartment with the frail hope that his wife will quickly become tired of the cuddly little bugger. Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, who co-wrote the wickedly clever and incisive script with frequent Luis Bunuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere, shows an engagingly light touch with this droll, frothy and mildly mocking comedy about staid'n'starchy steadfast bourgeois mores and attitudes which trenchantly satirizes the drabness, emptiness and superficiality of upper-class life, the absurdity of the rich's insistence on maintaining a respectable, well-mannered veneer in the most ridiculous of situations, male fear of impotence, and the hilariously desperate measures people will resort to in order to alleviate tedium and obtain some kind of emotional fulfillment with genuinely funny (the radiant Victoria Abril is a stitch as the timid maid whose face breaks out due to a severe monkey fur allergy), charming, and ultimately quite touching results. The fact that this film doesn't coyly gloss over the touchy subject of bestiality clinches its status as a deliciously eccentric and subversive treat.
Review of Max My Love
