Nothing Sacred

Not to be confused with the 1937 Technicolor screwball comedy starring Carol Lombard, confusion still reigns in Nothing Sacred.

Blonde twin Delilah is in Paris, an Anglophone who develops impeccable French language skills in her motel room after performing a dramatic black arts ritual on her tongue.

Freshly Francophone, she wows the woman who runs the B ‘n’ B and heads out into the City of Light. On a street corner, Delilah comes across a tarot card / 3-card Monty street performer and presses him for answers about a quest to find a man named Chambers, which leads to a tour of some catacombs replete with skulls.

Now this Chambers, a practitioner of magic, was foretold by an oracle that he’d die at the hands of “two children of the same seed.” And this sorcerer was responsible for the death of Delilah’s mother.

Twin #2 is Blue, a guy from Oklahoma who has never met Delilah and who’s first introduced to viewers, asking a psychic for clarity (And at this point it should be mentioned that this reviewer might’ve required the same thing, as the film is wave upon wave of exposition that threatened to overturn a 9th Grade command of la langue française. You see, the first 15 minutes is all in French sans subtitles, which definitely didn’t help re: the film’s impenetrability.)

Delilah meets up with her fraternal twin Blue, kills the psychic and the duo embark on a journey to the Arc de Triomphe.

Inside the famous Parisian monument, she’s chased by a minotaur and the brother saves the day with a brick. They procure the beast’s horn, “getting what they came for.” (this was news to me, as there was no indication they were going to the Arc or for what purpose or that the horn was “a perfect compass”).

Finding the phantasmagorical Chambers proves difficult.

The duo tracks down his son, who is some real estate magnate and Blue goes undercover as an Oklahoma land developer. The magic apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, as Chambers’ son asks Blue to “gaze into the secret woods,” some kind of portal into the Sooner State of Oklahoma and then shows him the Glass of Narcissus.

Forgive this moment of solipsism, but this reviewer was then left completely and utterly flummoxed.

Later, there was apparently some globetrotting as the beginning of the film foretold via the very opening credits, that Nothing Sacred contained dialogue in English, French and Muskogee, a tribal language in Oklahoma. Didn’t stick around long enough to stamp the passport back to North American shores.

** (out of 5)