The Driver’s Seat (AKA Identikit) review – Elizabeth Taylor captivates in bizarre 70s mystery

Taylor is both hammy and subtle as a woman on the verge of a breakdown in this preposterous but watchable 1974 drama that features an extraordinary cameo from Andy Warhol

It’s peak 70s Liz Taylor in this arrestingly bizarre movie directed by Italian film-maker Giuseppe Patroni Griffi in 1974, which he co-adapted from the 1970 novella by Muriel Spark and was released under the title Identikit in the US. With her big sunglasses and permanently dishevelled jet-black hair, Taylor gives an intense and more-than-slightly alarming performance in a preposterous, slightly dated yet very watchable psycho-existential mystery, a cousin to the era’s paranoid thrillers. It was shot by Vittorio Storaro, who repeatedly directs light sources into the camera so that the figures often move like shadows behind a disconcerting glow, which is part of the film’s distinctive puzzle.

Taylor plays Lise, a single woman of a certain age who is clearly on the verge of a breakdown. Lise lives in Hamburg, where she is seen buying oddly garish, multicoloured clothes in a department store, high-handedly terrorising the sales assistants and announcing that these garments are appropriate for the warm, southern climes to which she says she is heading. We first see Lise drifting through a surreal department filled with naked mannequins; perhaps The Driver’s Seat has been an influence on Peter Strickland.