The Decorator

A flamboyant interior decorator—equal parts dandy and demolition crew—waltzes into a sun-drenched atelier crammed with canvases that still glisten like wet lacquer. Within minutes, the stranger’s velvet gloves become wrecking balls: a terra-cotta torso topples, a stained-glass panel shatters into kaleidoscopic shrapnel, and an Expressionist triptych is repurposed as a doormat. The household artists, initially dazzled by his couture swagger, watch in mute horror as their life’s work is re-arranged into accidental Dadaist collages. Kathleen Myers, playing the resident sculptor, tries to seduce order from entropy with a chisel; Jack Lloyd’s painter flees into alcohol-sopped soliloquies; Evelyn Nelson’s ingénue pirouettes between hysteria and arousal; Oliver Hardy’s butler deadpans apoplectic glances that could melt bronze. Each new catastrophe is scored by the decorator’s delighted squeals—an aria of aesthetic sacrilege—until the villa itself seems to exhale plaster dust like cigarette smoke. When the final frame freezes on a grinning Jimmy Aubrey cradling a cracked bust as if it were a newborn, the film has already questioned whether creation has any meaning once the caretaker becomes the vandal.