Death is typically portrayed as humanity’s greatest fear, the ultimate unknown that ends all possibility. Yet, in Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s haunting 1974 film “Identikit,” death transforms into the singular obsession driving a woman toward her own carefully orchestrated demise.
The DeBartolo Performing Arts Center (DPAC) held a screening of “Identikit” on Sept. 18, offering audiences a chance to encounter a polarizing work of cinema. Also released under the title “The Driver’s Seat,” this Italian psychological drama represents a collision of high art and Hollywood glamour, starring the Old Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor as the character Lise in one of her most bizarre roles. The film’s bohemian credentials are cemented further by memorable appearances from the artist Andy Warhol as an English lord.
The film follows Lise as she journeys from Copenhagen to Rome on a premeditated search for anyone to kill her. This eccentric motive leads her to form numerous dangerous liaisons, all of whom continuously reappear in flash-forward scenes while investigators attempt to find out what truly happened after her death.
“Identikit” has not carved itself a place in film history through conventional success. With a disjointed, non-linear narrative jumping between flash forwards and fragments of Lise’s fate, audiences witness the breakdown of identity itself as if through a mirror. Viewers are kept destabilized through this lack of linear storytelling, as the knowledge of Lise’s death is explicit, but we are unaware of when or how it happened. Yet, I felt the fragmented structure of the film sometimes risked audience alienation rather than audience engagement, as the constant flash forwards spoil the suspense of Lise’s death instead of deepening it.
From the opening scene where she erupts at a saleswoman, Taylor appears disheveled and deranged, heavily contrasting with her earlier image as an actress who rose to global prominence through her striking beauty and grand blockbuster roles. To me, however, Taylor’s performance was what kept the film enjoyable to watch. It was incredibly refreshing to see an actress abandon glamour to embody raw instability, showing how even major stars are able to escape typecasting and weaponize their personae against audience stereotypes.
As I sat in the theater and watched Lise descend more and more into madness each second, I found myself wondering about the reactions of audiences at the time of the film’s release. In the decade of “Jaws,” “The Godfather” and “Star Wars,” I doubted that such a psychologically intense film centering around a singular woman would have gained positive reception — and I was right. Mainstream audiences of the time found the film alienating, and critics dismissed it as incoherent and overly melodramatic, since Griffi’s direction refuses to provide the comfort of traditional storytelling. Scenes bleed into one another without warning, keeping viewers off balance. Time becomes elastic, cause and effect blur, and we the audience feel trapped within Lise’s deteriorating mental landscape. The film’s unsettling composition ultimately enhances its psychological depth, immersing the viewer in a fragmented world that mirrors Lise’s own collapse. What audiences in the 1970s may have found bewildering can be recognized as formal experimentation, with the very strangeness that once alienated critics emerging as a potential strength.
In retrospect, “Identikit” anticipates many of the qualities associated with later experimental and cult cinema. Rather than dismissing it as incoherent melodrama, it is more productive to read the film as an avant-garde work positioned at an intersection of European art cinema and Hollywood celebrity culture. From this perspective, “Identikit” belongs within a broader lineage of films that were too radical to be fully understood at the moment of release but endure precisely because they challenge conventional narrative and aesthetic expectations. Its recent screening at DPAC underscores this reevaluation, displaying how film can disturb, unsettle and provoke new ways of thinking about identity and death.
