"Zardoz"

After the big-city violence of Point Blank and the backwoods animal viciousness of Deliverance, director John Boorman is taking a new look at man's aggressive instincts. In his sixth film, Zardoz, a futuristic fantasy starring Sean Connery and shot in Ireland, he sets the primitive against the hypercivilized and watches the result.

"I have always been conscious of the conflict between our explosive natures and our civilization, but to recognize that this clash exists often gets you accused of fascism. But people are beginning to realize that life can't be lived purely rationally--even the prissiest critics are beginning to accept this-- and that lets a lot of air in.

"We are quite unsuited to lead civilized lives, yet we persist in refusing to recognize all sorts of natural uncivilized drives in ourselves. We accept that people can be transformed by sex, for example, but we don't face the need for the expression of anger, the need for release of violence. I'm not advocating the release of our violent feelings without control, but we have to recognize that they exist and learn to deal with them."

Set 300 years in the future, Zardoz pictures a society of intellectual elitists shut off and protected from a polluted, desolate world. The members of the commune are immortal and perpetually young, but the men have become effete, bored and sexually disinterested. The women have turned to lesbianism, but that, too, has lost its savor and all forms of sexual activity die out. "Sex is closely tied to survival and survival to violence," says Boorman. Where survival is guaranteed and violence unknown, sexuality wanes.

But outside the commune, survival is a matter of brute force. Order is kept by a specially bred brand of Exterminators, priests of Zardoz, the god of death, (text concluded on page 168)"Zardoz"(Continued from page 143) and they and their god are manipulated by the Immortals in the commune. "The gun is good, the penis evil," declaims the image of Zardoz in a sermon that sounds oddly like the ranting of a freaked-out member of the National Rifle Association. "The penis shoots seed, the gun shoots destruction."

When one of the priests, Zed (Sean Connery), finds his way into the commune, he is met by a mixture of scientific curiosity and hostility. Geneticist May (Sara Kestelman, who won acclaim as Titania in the Royal Shakespeare Company's controversial and internationally praised production of Midsummer Night's Dream, here making her film debut) wants to examine the make-up of this virile and aggressive figure, but her colleague and ex-lover, Consuella (Charlotte Rampling, who first drew world attention tion as Lynn Redgrave's bitchy roommate in Georgy Girl and won highbrow favor in Visconti's study of depraved Nazi Germany, The Damned), hates Zed and feels threatened by him. Sent into upheaval by his arrival, by his primitive violence and by his sexual appetite, the commune wakes from its placidity and begins to self-destruct.

Women play unusually prominent parts in Boorman's new movie. His previous films have been heavily masculine, so much so that he himself has been accused of machismo. "I'd never heard that word until I read the reviews of Deliverance," "It's infantile, adolescent. It's what is wrong with many American men--the cowboy complex. They want to play the tough silent gun fighter. They have to find some way of developing their 'femininity.' That's what is so marvelous about Sean--he has all the hairy-chested sexuality, but he has an interesting soft streak alongside the dour, rough Scottish grittiness."

Researching for the film, Boorman visited many communes throughout the U.S.A. "I was shocked," he admits now, "in the way you are shocked by something you thought you knew and find you didn't. I was shocked because women were living in the commune in real equality with the men and I realized I hadn't seen that before. I had thought that I believed in women's equality, but I discovered that really I didn't. I can't accept that they're the equals of men. Guilty about it? Yes, but I can't add any more to my burden of guilt. Once you get to 40, you really can't take on any more."