Arabesque pretends to be the story of a philologist named David Pollock (Gregory Peck) who is hired to translate a snippet of ancient Hittite text. In reality, however, Arabesque is a study of what a woman as beautiful as Sophia Loren (who plays Yasmin Azir) can get away with. You really don't need to watch the movie to find out the answer, which is that women as beautiful as Sophia Loren can get away with just about anything. Throughout the film, she will talk all the male characters into believing whatever she says. It's unfortunate that she never addresses the men in the audience directly to instruct us to like the film.
I wish I could say that the film demonstrates its point about beautiful women in a charming way because I'm quite an admirer of Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren and would very much like to have seen director Stanley Donen recreate the charm of Charade (which had gone over so well just three years earlier). But there's really nothing very charming about Arabesque. It's a drearily unimaginative treatment of double-crosses and triple-crosses with occasional close-ups of Loren's cleavage or her thighs. To say that the film is 'by-the-numbers' is to dishonor those screenwriter hacks who understand by-the-number writing well enough to produce believable (if predictable) plots. Down to the detail of an inscription that no one has ever bothered to make a copy of, Arabesque shows itself to be unconcerned with verisimilitude. It must be a farce, only it isn't funny.
Donen tries to do some interesting work with the camera. There are lots of scenes involving reflections (in water or in mirrors), scenes that allow us to look through glasses, microscopes, and binoculars, and scenes in which we shift from seeing people on television screens to seeing them in person. If anything at all interesting had happened in the script, I'm sure I would have understood how the idea of filtering images was the key to unlocking the question raised by the screenplay. As the film is, however, I can only say that I am not even interested in the questions that the film might have been trying to raise, much less the answers.
The film's attempts to explore such activities as voyeurism and foot fetishism are forced and phony. There's a not-at-all clever scene in which Pollard hides from a man who has imprisoned him by holing himself up in Yasmin's shower. When Yasmin is ordered to take a shower, she has no alternative but to remove her towel and get in. She and Pollack exchange naughty grins about how he is getting to see her backside. One hates to think of Sophia Loren's backside as being involved in anything so childish. The foot massages and shoe scenes are equally misguided attempts to eroticize a woman who quite simply doesn't need any help in the eroticization department.
Here's the plot: People chase each other, hide from each other, lie to each other, knock each other over the head, wear disguises, make jokes that aren't funny, and end up rescued (if they're good), foiled (if they're bad), or in love (if they're Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren). In an extremely clumsy denouement, Pollard pretends to accidentally leave the canoe that he is sharing with Yasmin. He claims that he can't swim as he falls into the water. The viewer realizes that this is the end, that when Yasmin jumps into the water to save him, everything will be all right and the credits will roll. And of course everything works out fine because Pollard was lying about not being able to swim. It's not even the least bit amusing as a finale. In fact, it's downright cheap. Donen accomplishes the impossible in this film: He presents me with a wet Sophia Loren and prompts my irritation. There's got to be some especially bad filmmaking going on for that to happen.
Still, Loren can get away with anything. Don't imagine for a moment that I can bring myself to give this one the single star it deserves.
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