Legacy

Superficially, there are resemblances to the Hollywood soap opera about the bored, anxiety-ridden wife, left alone to brood in her automated and luxurious household. However, with its edge of pain moving towards madness and suicide, and its sexual accuracy and eroticism, the film emerges as something fresher and truer. Despite being totally unsympathetic, the heroine increasingly engages our feelings with her intense frustration and rage. A small, claustrophobic work, and though the director tries to turn her heroine's anger into a metaphor for the death of an old America, its power derives from the raw image of a solitary woman, trapped and crying, 'I hate!'