Hitchcock's phrase "photographs of people talking" should be hammered into the popular vocabulary. It defines an astoundingly large proportion of the mediocrity that passes for cinema, and it suggests such calumny as La Fuga deserves: "photographs of people thinking."

Director Paolo Spinola seems to have realized he had a non-film on his hands. It opens with four minutes of enigmatic action, no dialogue; this may be Spinola's deliberate smoke-screen intended to distract us from the great poverty of visual narrative forthcoming. In like manner, every bogged-down scene has people fiddle with things to keep the camera amused. They light infinite cigarettes, they jerk curtain cords, while they talk, talk, and talk.

The subject of this unsatisfactory exercise is a young woman's frigidity, her failure as a wife and mother, her dabbling with Lesbianism, and her psycho-analysis. The dialogue is uproariously banal. Husband to wife re son: "Don't you realize that a lack of affection will cause him neurosis?" Wife to shrink: "Why, in my dreams, won't my mother let me sit beside her?" Shrink: "Are you sure you can't answer that?" Wife: "Perhaps because she kept me at a distance--even as a child?"

La Fuga seeks to identify itself with Fellini and the Confessional School of scripting. Sunstruck, overexposed, high contrast dream sequences play out in silence, or with spooky music. Nothing unusual happens in them, though. The unconscious was never before so uninteresting.

Incongruously good photography, and an excellent performance by Anouk Aimee, serve as counterweights for this film's amateurish bumbling. Without them and without the recurrent outcry of an unspeakable musical score, La Fuga's every audience might find merciful numbness from what now is a laser ray of cruelly focused tedium.