The Talkies / The Rose and Luna

...Pictures of brain waves were triumphantly pointed at...

...Mark Rydell's The Rose, in which Bette Midler makes her screen debut, and Bernardo Bertolucci's Luna, starring Jill Clay burgh, are essentially vehicles for their respective leading ladies...

...Admittedly, he had traces of that dread smile...

...We can't control it properly as yet, move forward and back at will, you know, and we manage to stay in the air for only brief periods...

...When ushered later into a room covered with mattresses and told that it was "the flying room," I merely mumbled something along the lines of, "Ah, the flying room, quite so, for flying I imagine, well you have a fine room for it...

...Appropriately, Verdi's operas have played a part in other films by Bertolucci: The Spider's Strategem, for instance, a 1970 Italian television film, concerned a plot to kill Mussolini during a performance of Rigoletto...

...Warburton actually extruded an unanswerable piece of scientific logic: "If you spoke at random to more people who have learned to fly, you would not get such a bad response...

...These benefits had been given the technical name of "the Maharishi effect," a spreading influence of orderliness and harmony in the collective consciousness of the whole society...

...The operatic subject, incidentally, resonates well with themes both within the film and without...

...Don't be silly," she replied...

...But there is nothing campy about her chilling performance as The Rose, the fictitious name for the Janis Joplin character, who dies from an overdose of pills and liquor...

...he has capitalized on her physical weaknesses by emphasizing them to the point where she becomes, in Cocteau's words, "better than beautiful...

...Suddenly, everything fell into place...

...The story is, of course, the worst kind of soap opera trash, and, in moral terms, utterly unredeemable, although Bertolucci probably deserves some credit for having turned this material into what might be considered a pleasurable film, if we can divide, temporarily, our aesthetic judgments from our moral sense...

...So, of course, the violence started up again...

...Moreover, Miss Clayburgh gives a perfectly balanced, believable performance, even in the opera sequences, where she manages to sustain the illusion that she is singing despite the fact that her voice was dubbed by several sopranos...

...Comparative tests of heartbeats and pulse rates were cited...

...A sharp one, that Hester...

...But she was, as ever, femininely matter-of-fact...

...It's all a hoax...

...Ah, Jeeves...

...But keeping 100 top spiritual leaders in a luxury hotel was an expensive business," went on the Minister sadly, "and after a while we had to pull them out...

...Only an utter cad, I felt, would bring up the subject of walking through walls...

...Warburton was simply doing his job...

...Are not the really dedicated levita-tionists altogether more sympathetic...

...But, in striking a mystical note, I had entirely missed the point...

...There clung about him, as about his Cabinet colleagues, the impression of a mild, unassuming, but determined belief that made one reluctant to ask brutal questions and yet made the most obvious enquiries seem, somehow, dreadfully brutal...

...My only serious quarrel with yogis is a patriotic one...

...Some weeks later, the Guardian newspaper reported that 2 number of TM disciples had left the movement, disillusioned that it had failed to produce the spiritual and physical uplift promised...

...Behind the lecturer, apparently themselves scientific validation of this claim, were the Ministers of This and That and The Other and Everything Else, all suave and glittering in their evening clothes, every one a debutante's delight, a battalion of Dorian Grays...

...Had a dowager entered the room at that point, she would have wired instantly to her unmarried daughters: "Come at once...

...Between singing engagements she almost has a lesbian affair with her companion-manager, does have an affair with her son, and finally is reunited with her ex-lover...

...It is evening at Totleigh Towers...

...I'm the Minister for Research and Development and All Possibilities...

...So, after the briefest of pauses, we murmured the usual pleasantries and were handed a Maharishi cocktail: a glass of orange juice, with any transcending done under your own steam...

...So flying is a bit of an exaggeration...

...Over the vegetable pie, Mr...

...Your young Master is determined...

...Back in the piazza for an after-dinner lecture, we heard the Minister for AH Possibilities disavow any similarity to cults and express an old-fashioned, almost Wellsian faith in the scientific method and its validation of TM...

...But I had heard rumors that advanced meditation techniques, known as the "TM-Sidhi Program," were supposed to endow adepts with astonishing powers, viz., the ability to fly, to become invisible, to walk through walls, to materialize objects out of thin air by sheer mental power, in short to amuse your friends and be a hit with the girls...

...Well, it's scarcely worthy of the name of flying as yet...

...But-and this was a portent for the rest of the evening-my intention quailed before his evident niceness...

...and both contain long and elaborately staged musical sequences...

...Although Bertolucci is one of Italy's most acclaimed directors and did in fact co-author the screenplay as well as produce and direct the film, the appellation in this case seems somewhat misapplied...

...Lay out my white mess jacket with the brass buttons and my flying helmet, would you...

...it was a scientifically validated program...

...No pulling the wool over her eyes...

...The singer played by Miss Clayburgh performs exclusively in the operas of Giuseppe Verdi, whose life and work had been an inspiration to her as a young student in Italy...

...I like the word "intuitively'' in the last sentence...

...Slides were shown to demonstrate that TM was more effective than sleep at producing really deep relaxation...

...In fact, as a result of the financial disaster of 1900, Bertolucci agreed to produce a non-political film that would be commercially successful...

...immediate impressions were reassuring...

...Both films also recall a hybrid genre-films that are not, properly speaking, musicals, but that combine music and drama, as in the biography of Chopin, A Song to Remember (1945), the bailet film The Red Shoes (1948), and the Judy Garland version of A Star is Born (1954)-that enjoyed a marginal vogue in the forties, declined in the mid-fifties, and resurged in the seventies with A Star is Born (this time with Barbra Streisand), another ballet film, The Turning Point, and, of course, Saturday Night Fever...

...Was it really the case, I wondered politely, that fully accredited yogis could, well, fly...

...nor does she discover him in a bar dancing in the arms of an older man...

...But perhaps Mr...

...of the apprentice hoppers carefully laying out the mattresses each morning, just in case of a crash landing from a great height- "Pilot error, old boy, sudden loss of faith, pranged down on the chaise longue '; of the Minister for Information and Inspiration explaining...

...Rydell, who directed Miss Midler, has faced honestly the fact that his leading lady is not in any conWilliam Neubauer is a writer living in Chicago...

...Eventually we were seen off by virtually the entire Administration of World Enlightenment and Transcendental Hopping, all waving cheerily, and returned bemused to that other world of "telegrams and anger...

...Luna is not one of Bertolucci's more personal films and is unrelated to the body of his previous work, which expressed, with varying degrees of intensity, the director's own socialist political orientation: e.g., The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), and 1900 (1977...

...Let me declare that, perhaps over-influenced by the diffident eccentricity displayed at the banquet, I have little sympathy for the disillusioned yogis...

...It is of no avail to frown, Jeeves...

...The result of this curious coupling of left-wing Italian politics and capitalistic American big business is a lavish amalgam that the director unabashedly calls a "melodrama...

...We're on Candid Camera," I said...

...One hundred top meditators had flown-conventionally-into Nicaragua at the height of the first round of fighting in the civil war and booked into the Managua Intercontinental Hotel, there to meditate full-time...

...I like to think of the Minister for R&D&AP earnestly photographing brainwaves...

...Luna has the expensive, richly polished surface associated with classic Hollywood movies: Bertolucci and his brilliant director of photography, Vit-torio Storaro, bathe most of the film in the mesmerizing light and warm late-afternoon colors of 18th-century landscape painting...

...Caterina's own life in the meantime has not been entirely uneventful...

...White mess jackets are all the rage in Cannes this year...

...In response to the Guardian's story, Mr...

...How do you do/' he began agreeably...

...Oh, that,'I replied my guide dis-missively...

...This was indeed inspiring stuff...

...If London lawyers of mature years are silly enough to join quasi-religious sects in the hope of learning to fly or mastering ancient techniques of materializing a black forest gateau out of thin air, then they deserve to end up bouncing around on their bums...

...But why speculate...

...It was at the same moment, as the young men smirked and looked bashful, that a terrible conviction came over me...

...In the library, the butler is laying out drinks and mattresses for postprandial relaxation...

...but it had been captured a while before and was by now thoroughly domesticated...

...ventional sense a beautiful or even pretty woman...

...And had not the invitation distinctly promised a banquet-a word redolent of many courses, sorbets to cleanse the palate in between, excellent claret, 30-year-old brandy, beautiful immoral women/ and other delights not often provided in tin-roofed salvation sheds...

...It's just bouncing around on your bum," complained one bitterly...

...There is a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi...

...I was tempted for a moment to reply that I was a homicidal psychopath, just escaped from Broadmoor, to see who blinked first...

...Luna's title resembles, not coincidentally, the name of a character from // Trova-tore, Count di Luna, and that opera's first act finale is included in the film complete with an enormous prop moon...

...We shouldn't have been so polite...

...So a fairly junior Minister took us in tow for a guided tour of Mentmore, explaining as we went along the value of Transcendental Meditation as a sort of psychological equivalent of jogging...

...Yes, there was such an example...

...The movement calls this 'un-stressing,' but I intuitively began to wonder what was happening to me...

...It was a scene of fashion and affluence, rather like an advertisement for an up-market menthol cigarette...

...In Rome she discovers Joe shooting heroin...

...Yes," I said weakly, hoping that it would come out, "no," but too, cowed and in the grip of social embarrassment to manage a clear denial...

...Studies showed, he said, that if one percent of a city's population practiced TM, then accidents declined, hospital admissions decreased, crime fell, creative activities flourished, and industrial productivity soared beyond our wildest imaginings...

...Warburton gave me a smile- but a different sort of smile, an I'mglad-you-asked-that-question kind of smile...

...both are focused on the careers and emotional problems of successful contemporary American singers...

...And lo and behold, the fighting had come to a halt...

...We entered the reception hall, an indoor piazza green with potted plants, surrounded by pillars, and set under a windowed roof that shed soft summer light over small groups of elegant middle-class English people in conventional evening dress, all chattering politely away and accepting drinks from liveried flunkies...

...Someone will come bounding out from behind the arras any minute and ask us to sign a release form...

...On the lawn, Madeline Bassett is correcting her thesis on the statistical correlation between the wails of babies arid the birth rate among fairies...

...Business organizations encouraged their executives to try it...

...Well, p'raps, you never know, stranger things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, and all that...

...It had been established that TM, in addition to its other benefits, also rendered its practitioners youthful in appearance...

...And Miss Hester Fishberg, "a 31 year-old London lawyer," described the scenes of meditation thus: "You saw people leaping around the room like frogs, shaking, screaming, babbling...

...There is, as they say, no answer to that...

...As a matter of fact, among ourselves we call it 'hopping.' " This diffident reply disarmed me morally...

...Luna is the story of Caterina (Jill Clayburgh), an American opera star, and Joe (Matthew Barry), her 15-year-old son by a former Italian lover...

...The film's climax, in which Miss Clayburgh is reunited finally with her son and ex-lover, is a rehearsal of the last scene of Un Ballo in Maschera, magnificently staged in an open-air theatre in the ruins of the baths of Caracalla, which was, significantly, the same setting used by Fellini for Anita Ekberg's orgiastic dance in La Dolce Vita...

...Upstairs, in his room, Gussie Fink-Nottle is busily photographing the brain waves of newts...

...Miss Midler has not only invented an original character, but has also developed a vocal style especially appropriate to the singer she plays...

...Miss Midler, who began her career singing to an audience of homosexuals in a New York Turkish bath, is known as a camp comedienne who specializes in nostalgia...

...As a matter of fact, among ourselves, we call it 'squeezing.' ") Fortunately, at that moment, a red-coated flunky announced that dinner was served and we were ushered into Mentmore's sumptuous dining hall for the banquet...

...After the death of her American husband, who has reared the boy as his own, she flys to Italy with her son to honor her singing commitments...

...But there is a postscript to this curious tale...

...The Minister for R&D&AP was host for the evening with other guests to greet...

...Studies showed that crime fell, creativity soared, hospital admissions plummeted, etc...

...We'll look gullible fools...

...Who would go to all this expense, just to make a fool of you?71 Thus reassured, I relapsed into polite acquiescence and began to enjoy myself...

...The auteur theory of filmmaking, of course, has dominated most serious film criticism for a decade and the American movie industry has responded by assigning a possessive credit even to first films by novice directors...

...The new Bertolucci film Luna is a star vehicle also, but for more than Jill Clay burgh: A close glance at tlie movie's poster reveals that the words "A Film by Bernardo Bertolucci" are in slightly larger type than the name of the actress...

...And since my hosts were themselves charming even in the face of skepticism, we ended the evening on the friendliest of terms...

...It seemed not...

...Nevertheless, I rallied myself sufficiently to ask if there was' an unambiguous example of this Maharishi effect working on cue...

...doctors recommended it as therapy for nervous illnesses...

...I turned to my pretty companion...

...The Rose, ostensibly a fictional account of the last tragic days of rock singer Janis Joplin, is a varied treatment of the A Star is Born theme, a darker, cynical, more "contemporary' ' treatment, in which the roles of the rising young superstar and her declining, self-destructive alcoholic husband merge into a single character, played with admirable overstatement by Bette Midler...

...Why have they got involved with mysterious Oriental fakirs and foreign types when there is a perfectly serviceable English tradition on which they could base their activities-the tradition of mad squires and country house eccentricity...

...Peter 'Warburton, the Minister for Information and Inspiration, a tall, dark, handsome, and earnest young man wearing impeccable dinner clothes and the sincere frown of an idealistic young doctor in a soap opera, explained matters further...

...I am in the mood for parlor-nautics...

...She does not, however, discover him in the balcony of a cinema in the act of mutually undressing with a young girl while watching Marilyn Monroe on the screen in Niagara...

...This was all strictly scientific, no-nonsense, feet-on-the-ceiling stuff...

...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS (continued from page 6) grateful for the prospect of Lucullan entertainment for which others were paying...

...A young man came across to welcome us...

...Miss Midler-in glitzy iridescent dress, with frizzed hair (strongly backlighted in pinkish-red), stockings torn, lashes beaded, and a microphone clutched in her hands-may be the conclusive image of the sixties' rock culture...