“You are going to try to be lucid and honest,” the cartoon-deep psychoanalyst intones repeatedly in an exceedingly dreary, faintly amateurish film gutted out of Iris Murdoch’s smashingly arch little novel, A Severed Head. Head concerns wine merchant Martin Lynch-Gibbon (Ian Holm, a rare find) whose pretty mistress (Jennie Linden), flighty wife, studsy-sculptor brother and analyst-best friend (Richard Attenborough) confound his decidedly petulant determination to keep everyone in his and her place in his, Martin’s, neatly compartmentalized life. Alas poor Martin when the swapping starts: Martin’s wife to analyst to Martin’s brother; Martin’s mistress to Martin’s brother to analyst; and Martin? Martin to mistress to wife
to—hoo ha—analyst’s bitchy half-sister, an Oxford don (donness?), Honor Klein, a dour incestuess with a taste for samurai swords. Whoosh. Whoosh.
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