Estranho Encontro

Khouri is shown here as a talented author who perfectly understands the medium and genre and knows how to use it for his purposes. Just as he later managed to crush the bourgeoisie with its own weapon - the Antonioni self-reflective mirror of empty nights and empty souls - he demonstrates here with subtle play with the film genre a bear service to conventional Hollywood drama, almost on the edge of parody. Hitchcock grasped, understood, and surpassed. Partial spoilers follow: the demonic character of the main antagonist, whose terrifying and alluring nature was heightened by the mise-en-scène game of delaying the reveal of her face, turns out to be a paper tiger after the cataclysmic revelation - the revelation of banality does not lead to any revelation of hidden evil behind a normal mask, thus intensifying its scariness ("even a normal person can tear us apart in the shower"), but rather the hidden evil is revealed as a demonstration of the principle "fear has big eyes" (like the exposed fixed gaze of the main protagonist, see also the film poster), thus revealing the typical process of bourgeois film audience psychology. The mysterious evil is revealed as a helpless neurotic. Similarly, where the viewer of conventional 1950s films expects the final shot of the happy couple around whom the whole melodramatic plot revolves, they find the exact opposite: instead of a happy ending (gain) with a man and a woman who have been waiting for each other and have become terrifying representatives of phantasmagorical happiness of Hollywood's alias capitalist-surrealist superhumans, they see the loss (sorrow) of a humanized character who, all the way up to the climax of the film, was associated with danger through the typical means of film symbolism (again emphasized in the mise-en-scène, for example, by wearing the same coat in the happy ending scene that previously symbolized danger). Moreover, the eyes of the main protagonist say much more than they would like to. And it could continue: Khouri's subversion of conventional genre meanings makes this film a unique foreshadowing of the fact that after understanding the rules of the game, every game is revealed as empty: including the film, including life. (09.11.2020)