The Sailor from Gibraltar

Highfalutin nonsense adapted (though not so you would notice) from a Marguerite Duras novel. Bannen plays an English registry office clerk on holiday in Italy, bored by his life and a mistress (Redgrave) who keeps shepherding him off to art museums. In search of he knows not what, he takes up with a mysterious Frenchwoman (Moreau) who sails the seas in her yacht searching for the lover - a sailor from Gibraltar - with whom she experienced perfect happiness until he disappeared. The sailor, it seems, is symbolic of something everyone needs but doesn't usually find; so when Moreau and Bannen decide they are madly in love after sailing about the world a bit, she stops worrying about the sailor. Encounters en route with assorted enigmatic characters bring more loony tunes, none more so than Orson Welles, grubbily impersonating one Louis from Mozambique, since you can't understand a word he says. The whole film, in fact, seems to be coming filtered through cotton-wool. In the circumstances, Raoul Coutard's camerawork isn't half bad.