Losey: Eva (1962)

Based on a 1945 hard-boiled novel by James Hadley Chase, Eva is about the agonising, self-destructive affair between Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker), a sham novelist, and Eva (Jeanne Moreau), a scheming, gambling femme fatale. Although Chase’s novel was set in Hollywood, Losey moves the action to Venice, where the romance plays out among a loose English and American expatriate community. At one level, that feels like an autobiographical decision, a pretext for Losey to contemplate his excommunication from the United States and uneasy adjustment to the English film industry. But it also offers a striking opportunity for him to exercise and extend his signature tracking-shots, since, from the opening vaporetti sequence, it’s clear that his camera intends to glide as effortlessly through Venice’s streets and rooms as it does across its waters. Combined with a sinuous, jazzy score, the city feels so fluid that Losey can almost improvise it into a new configuration each time he shoots it, meaning that it’s often quite unrecognisable as Venice, as if the true nature of this city were to defamiliarise every new space as soon as we encounter it. As if that weren’t exquisitely disorienting enough, Losey tends to elide human faces and bodies from his tracking-shots, instead lingering over all the objects that Tyvian buys, sells and barters to keep Eva in his pocket – it’s as if each mise-en-scene is trying to recreate the experience of sitting down at a gambling table, all eyes on the objects laid out before us, fondling each one to calculate its exact risk and worth. As might be expected, that severely objectifies and debilitates Tyvian, making for one of the most harrowing, masochistic performances of Baker’s career – it continually feels like he’s fighting to get back into the frame, while getting off on how scrupulously Losey, and Eva, keep him in his place. Not that far removed from some of von Stroheim’s romances of degradation – Queen Kelly in particular comes to mind – it’s clear that the lapse of time between 1945 and 1962, and the imminent sexual revolution, hasn’t done anything to diminish Chase’s original vision. If anything, it’s allowed Losey to refine it, stripping Eva of the grace, art or nuance that might have cloaked her in classical noir, divesting her cruelty of beauty, in one of his most startling, uncompromising literary adaptations.