Secret Ceremony is both extraordinary and nearly unendurable. Director Joseph Losey ratchets up the dramatic tension as high as it will go, yet refuses to hurry anything along, leaving the viewer trapped, endlessly adrift in a spooky, desperate, mad world. Mia Farrow's performance as the disturbed waif Cenci might be her career-best; certainly, she is at her most extreme and uninhibited. Truly, Farrow brings the extra-strength psycho-Goth-pixie magic. Liz Taylor, looking large, lugubrious, and lovely, is also fantastic here as desperate Leonora. Together, their two characters interlock their traumas in a folie a deux, "madness for two"...and find something like love. The film is a cornucopia of sexual trauma, loss, grief, mental illness, incest, suicide. Like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?", the emotional tenor of the film is pitched so high that the effect on the viewer is downright punishing. With two lesser actresses, the film's melodramatic excesses might have become John Waters-level camp. But with the twin goddesses Farrow and Taylor chewing up the scenery so masterfully, there's no laughs, just one dark, wild ride (albeit, a reeeeally slow one) that keeps getting darker and wilder. In the end, it's hard not to be relieved that the film is over. Secret Ceremony is an incredible film, if you can withstand it.
Review of Secret Ceremony
