Directed by:
Joseph LoseyScreenplay:
Robert ShawComposer:
Richard Rodney BennettCast:
Robert Shaw, Malcolm McDowell, Roger Lloyd Pack, Robert East, Pamela Brown, Andy Bradford, Henry WoolfVOD (1)
Plots(1)
The subject of persecution, so recurrent in Losey's cinema, is taken to the nth degree of abstraction in this work. Two men flee through an inhospitable landscape plagued with dangers. A helicopter chases them incessantly, like a tenacious, tireless animal with no intention of giving up on its prey. It's not clear who's hunting them or why. (San Sebastian International Film Festival)
(more)Reviews (1)
In terms of location and cinematography, Figures in a Landscape is an absolutely captivating project in which a straightforward story about two prisoners on the run from somewhere to anywhere dissolves into an existential parable about escape in all of its possible meanings and connotations – from prison, from guilt, from society and the system, and from oneself. Losey stated that he (or rather Shaw, who wrote the screenplay) intentionally separated the film adaptation from the specificity of the source work in terms of the historical and geographical setting in order to get to the substance of a universal treatise on the general levels of the situation involving the escape of two men who are different from each other across a land that is hostile to them in a number of respects.
()