X Y & Zee
by Brian G. Hutton
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VHS Tape Cover Information
Actor: Elizabeth Taylor, John Standing, Margaret Leighton, Michael Caine, Susannah YorkDirector: Brian G. Hutton
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Color, NTSC
Running Time: 110 minutes
Release Date: 2000-05-16
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: Sony Pictures
Studio: Sony Pictures
VHS Movie Reviews of X Y & Zee
Movie Review: Acting like she's in VIRGINA WOOLF 2, Taylor turns up the dail to MAXIMUM in this stupefying howl-fest!
Summary: 5 Stars
Liz Taylor nearly kissed off her stunning WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? comeback with an almost unbroken string of howl fests -- and this is one of the best of the worst. WIldly painted and bursting out of '60s psychedelic frocks in her a-go-go gone-amok phase, Taylor plays the sadistic, horny, wealthy, foul-mouthed wife of masochistic, horny, wealthy, foul-mouthed London architect Michael Caine.
The action starts when Caine, at a party, flashes his eyes at achingly sensitive boutique owner Susannah York. "You know, she told me she's prone to weeping if anything nice happems to her," hostess Margaret Leighton tells Liz of widow Susannah. Taylor bugs her eyes and gags: "Yuck! YUCK!"
Precisely.
Taylor turns into a woman run mad -- she's forever blaring bad rock music at home and rattling trash cans under the windows of York's flat yelling, "Is my husband in your chickenlike arms?" (You can tell that Caine likes York better because, in his scenes with her, his hair is washed.) After Liz barges in on the couple during a tete a tete, things start to get really weird: York mentions she's the mother of twins, and Taylor asks whether she breast-fed them, then relates, "I sat next to a man at dinner one night who said you haven't lived until you've seen a woman breast-feed twins. Evidentally his wife would lie sprawled on the bed, a t-t in either direction, and it was just fantastic."
York warns Caine, "Your wife -- she's possessed!" but all the sparring seems to get the married couple hot and bothered: Caine is soon back at home tying up Taylor in bed while she bellows, "You woman-hater! You fascist swine!" But, when he moves to release her, she says "No! No! Don't untie me. I want it that way."
Inevitably, Caine finds Taylor with her wrists slashed in a tubful of blood and when she doesn't die, Taylor turns up the performing dail to "MAXIMUM," acting as if she's playing Martha in VIRGINIA WOOLF all over again (blissfully ignoring such details as the fact that this time she didn't have Mike Nichols -- or anyone else, apparently -- directing her in an Edward Albee prize winning play).
Taylor elicits from York, who is at her hospital bedside, a rollicking confession of a Youthful Lesbian Incident. With a nun, yet. "You know," vamps Taylor, "I could get used to having you as my personal slave." While Caine gets it on with his mousy secretary, York and Taylor (mercifully, mostly, off-camera) play slave and mistress games, only to be discovered by Caine. The love-'em-and-leave-'em Taylor leaves York a snivelling mass, Caine doubly cuckolded, declaring about York, "She sees beauty in everything -- especially sh-t!"
We couldn't put it better.
Summary of X Y & Zee
The quintessence of '70s dreck, albeit with one and a half feet stuck in the '60s. Swinging London was already a faded memory in 1972 (and the spectacle of Dame Margaret Leighton in a see-through blouse did nothing to inspire nostalgia for it). More to the point, the consider-the-possibilities algebra of the title and the central casting of Liz Taylor as Zee, a game-playing virago of a wife, suggest a wishful revamp of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), without a Richard Burton to supply wit, grace, and feeling. Even Michael Caine, who plays Zee's feckless architect husband, seems to be coasting on rueful memories of Alfie (1965).Out of bored habit more than passion, Caine erotically targets Susannah York, a vague country wife who may or may not be a widow. They begin an affair. Zee cottons on right away and does her utmost to play both ends against her full-figure-gal middle. Taylor's bitch-queen act lends a certain verve; she barges about the screen in a wardrobe of multicolored, tent-like horrors that suggest, oh, Genghis Khan in Arabia. It's a measure of the film's muddled sense of itself that Zee's early description of her rival--"a soulful slob [who's] always a little out of breath and sees beauty in everything"--is dead-on about the character and the normally lively Susannah York's performance.
Zee (like Virginia Woolf's Martha) is childless, and Edna O'Brien's script underscores how often the three principals call one another "baby." We won't tip the surprise-twist climax, but the ending is the nadir of '70s pseudo-sophistication, mindless technique mongering, and cluelessness masquerading as "adult" ambiguity. Not one freeze frame but a dozen... overlapped... with zooms in and out, yet. Turn on the lava lamps, get out the throw cushions, zap the microwave popcorn--this is a definitive trash wallow. --Richard T. Jameson
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