Savages

Strip away our veneer of civilisation, cast a dispassionate eye on our frantic attempts to gratify ourselves, and what do you find? You guessed. Ivory's earlier made-in-India movies got by on their 'delicacy' and 'sensitivity'; but this half-assed fable - about a bunch of jungle primitives turning, when a croquet ball mysteriously intrudes on their human sacrifice, into '30s socialites and then reverting back again - exposed the pseud beneath the aesthete. No wit, no thought, no surrealist flair, just vacuous decoration. It plays like a Ken Russell movie worked over by a taxidermist.