THE SCREEN

...Moreover, as both Claire's Knee and Ma Nuit Chez Maud demonstrate, speech not only precedes events in the moral tales, it threatens to overwhelm them...

...Kleist's narrative suggests that events are capable of having insanely opposite qualities at the same time, and this is no doubt what appealed to Rohmer...

...She answers that "he wouldn't have looked like a devil to her then if he had not seemed like an angel to her at first appearance...

...Rohmer's treatment doesn't exclude either possibility, nor does it deny that the breakage is what it seems on the surface, a perfectly innocent accident...

...For in the end this is the way Rohmer himself sees the world...

...Pinter is a playwright first, a creator of dramatic events, the implications of which float free for the viewer to trap, take home, domesticate, do with what he will...

...The author is a thirty-~/ear-old former Features Editor of Vogue whose first book was on the Chinese Empress Tz'u-hsi...

...As an artificer of "mediocre" characters to whom nothing happens, Rohmer is certainly not the arch-Romantic Kleist was...

...It almost paralyzes action, which remains at best virtually inconsequential...

...In No Man's Land the outsider is a down-at-heels poet, or perhaps a pub busboy who sounds and looks like one (Gielgud says he modeled his wardrobe on Auden's...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...In Ma Nuit Chez Maud, for instance, we hear several stories about icy Commonweal: 21 roads before the hero actually drives on one himself...

...His intricate connection with the small group is clear at the final curtain--not so much an ending as an abrupt breaking off of the action --when Hirst accepts Spooner's restatement of the "no man's land" that Hirst and all of them inhabit...

...In Rohmer's version alone, for example, a surrogate for the Count's impregnation of the Marquise is a scene where she is startled awake by the firing squad executing the molesters from whom the Count rescued her...

...This is the lastline of the story, and it leaves open for Rohmer the possibility of implying throughout the film that all his characters are in between angels and devils in precisely the way he has always thought man to b e - - half-way in between, in that middling, earthbound state which an earlier Rohmer hero characterizes as "mediOCt...

...Further, "The icon of Mary and Christ side by side is one of the Christian Church's most polished deceptions: it is the very image and hope of earthly consummated love used to give that love the lie...

...Consider the climactic moment of La Collectioneuse...

...Where they are all films about "mediocre" people to whom "nothing must happen," to put it in words from his characters' own mouths, The Marquise of 0 is a film in which everything happens: siege, molestation, rescue, unconscious rape, inexplicable pregnancy, resurrection from the dead, ostracism, public selfhumiliation, and, finally, reconciliation...

...prison...

...And always, man is left stranded awkwardly in the middle between these contending forces...

...For the most part, Spooner appears to be invulnerable to their barbs, until toward the end of the last act when he makes a determined plea for a permanent place in this strange mtnage---a place which he holds in any case since the Hirst establishment has its only reality on stage and Spooner, as abrasive presence, has been a part of it since the play began...

...This sfiding sense of reality only emphasizes that the theatrical moment is the closest in reality anyone can come to in a world with a redactable past and an unknown future...

...To that end Adden has also obtained a rare Chinese vase for the American, who is a collector, but in the climactic scene Haydee is leading both men a playful chase around a room and topples the vase off its stand, smashing it to pieces...

...Old Times), is introduced into a static social or familial situationmas the derelict is in The Caretaker, the wife in The Homecoming...

...Because it has this quality, Kleist's story allows Rohmer to insinuate his anti-Romanticism in it subtly and make the story his own...

...The event in~ No Man's Land is a favorite one with Pinter...

...There is a marvelous sequence in the second act, almost a parody of Oxcam-Home Counties gossip, in which the two old men begin to remember or invent old triumphs, old scandals...

...tomb...

...The virginal ideal reinforces l~he linking of sin, sex and death into "a web which traps every Christian...

...That short story which is being written at the beginning of Claire's Knee provides a kind of analogue between earlier work and the new film, as does a piece of sculpture we find in the prologue to Rohmer's La CoUectioneuse...

...For all that, however, The Marquise ot 0 does have a kind of continuity, a consistency, with Rohmer's other work, and this is in the end perhaps the overriding consideration in our response to the film...

...one of those enclosures in which Pinter so likes to trap his characters...

...Again and again, as revelation mounts upon predicament, author Heinrich von Kleist tells us in his novella, "and they all fell speechless...

...No Man's Land is the first Pin~er play in six years, but the audiences filling the Longacre are there less for the playwright's sake than for the chance to watch John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson perform...

...home...

...Or perhaps, being even more decadent than he, Haydee has broken the vase on a simple whim and with complete indifference to its value as art...

...Half the calamities in The Marquise of 0 listed above occur in the opening few scenes, and their effect, understandably, is that the characters are all struck dumb...

...Gielgud's Spooner is primly outrageous, a beautiful construction put together with minute details of gesture, grimace, movement...

...It will not appeal either to scholars or to ehe devout, but it is symptomatic of the contemporary mind...

...This sculpture, which two of the characters discuss, has been made by fastening razor blades edge-out around a tin can, and it prefigures the personality of the film's central character, a girl named Haydee...

...No Man's Land, then, falls short of the best of Pi~termtoo many Pinteresque echoes perhaps, tinging immediacy with artifice...

...When he was making the "moral tales," Rohmer always claimed, "I had no intention of preaching morals, but rather of reflecting on morals . . . . I consider my characters to be free...

...To be violated by life was for Kleist no doubt an epiphany of sorts...

...guards...

...in his eyes, it saved the Marquise from the terrible solitude of living within herself...

...Still, No Man's Land has substance, characters, wit, verbal dexterity-all that one has come to expect from Pinter--and it would be foolish to let the memory of earlier achievements stand in the way of the new play...

...This theme is repeated again and again: "the very conditions which make the Virgin sublime are beyond the powers of women to fulfill unless they deny their sex...

...hospital...

...It is a work of art that prophesies strangely the lives of the characters in the film, and yet also differs from their lives in small but appreciable details...

...The point is that both the short story recited in Claire's Knee and this piece of sculpture in La CoUectioneuse are ob]ets d'art that stand at the head of the film as a precedent, a precursor, of what is to follow...

...It's a way of seeing the world that is implicit in man's "mediocre" position half-way between heaven and hell...

...She has now produced a large, comprehensive, lavishly illustrated and interestingly written account of Marianism from its beginnings until now...

...Yet Kleist's story assumes its Romanticism so completelymindeed, it fairly swallows it whole--that there is a certain flatness about its episodes, a matter-of-factness that is both deeply pathetic and at the same time comical...

...At the end, for instance, the Marquise (Edith Clever) forgives the Count (Bruno Ganz) who has rescued, raped, courted and married her...

...In Rohmer's previous films, speech precedes events...

...After several acts of remarkable talkmthreats, cajolery, reminiscence, aborted philosophy--in which the intruder or the status quo appears to be in danger, the play ends, usually with a restatement of the original situation or a variar on it, as in The Homecoming...

...In The Marquise ol 0 ~ , on the other hand, action precedes speech and stifles it instead...

...BOOKS I MARIANISM AND MARINA WARNER GEORGE A. LINDBECK Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult o f the V t r g i n Mary MARINA WARNER Knopf, $15 This book may well create more excitement than it deserves...

...Where Rohmer and Kleist really meet, I think, is in a shared perception of life as something imponderably ambiguous...

...They are joined by Hirst's servants (keepera...

...I am I," says Spooner proudly, making his pitch for a job as well as a stranger, a supplicant as well as a free man, a busser of pintpots as well as a poet...

...Oblivious impregnations like that which befalls the Marquise in Kleist's story are practically a tradition in nineteenthcentury literature...

...Apart from a life-time of scholars.hip, it is inevitable that .those who risk works of this scope will often blunder in ways which make specialists wince, but Marina Warner is factually no more unreliable than most intelligent and hard-working generalists who write for the literate public...

...Accepting the Virgin as .the ideal of purity implicitly demands rejecting the ordinary female condition as impure" (77...

...In being "mediocre" because they are torn between exeremes--not the least of which are the extremes of Kleist's Romanticism and Rohmer's modernism--the characters in the film version of The Marquise o] 0 are terribly compromised...

...Although Terence Rigby, an old Pinter hand, and Michael Kitchen are doing good work with the other two roles, the chief pleasure of No Man's Land is watching Richardson and Gielgud work together...

...Such a view of love is untenable today...

...A woman lets someone whisper in her ear, gazes at the stars or, like the Marquise, nods off for a few minutes...

...Then I remembered David Storey's Home, in which the playing of Richardson and Gielgud moved the play to a painfully effective ending...

...Hirst, obviously affluent, apparently a successful literary man, brings Spooner back to his house, to a fascinating circular room (tower...

...Perhaps the breaking of the vase is that most moral of all human actions: revenge---an expression of Haydee's secret rage at the way Adrien has prostituted her...

...In Kleist's work Rohmer has found a vision of life that seems similarly irresolvable...

...In other words, Rohmer hasn't done just the deferential adaptation The Marquise of 0 at first appears, but rather, has seen in Kleist's work something suited to his own temperament...

...From Kleist's story through Hardy's Jude the Obscure, seduction and rape are forever occurring as if they were really the opposite of seduction and rape--as if they were immaculate conceptions...

...but it would be fairer, I think, to view it as a fairly normal example of what an ex-devotec who has learned to think in currently fashionable categories is likely to make of the Marian cult...

...another of Pinter's menacing comic pairs, descendants of McCann and Goldberg in The Birthday Party, who spend a good part of the play tormenting Spooner, as Mick does the old man in The Caretaker...

...Rohmer's strategy is to intensify some of the symbolic equations and symbolic contrasts in Kleist's story in a way that makes them self-mocking...

...But once they are reconciled, he asks why, when she placed a newspaper ad and was willing to marry whoever answered it, she was so chagrined that he had been the one...

...And before touching the knee of an ingenue named Claire at the film's climactic moment, the hero, Jerome, discusses endlessly with the story writer whether he should touch the girl's knee...

...GERALD WEALES R O H ~ RENEWED 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 TIs SCREI In the last issue I outlined some of the ways in which Eric Rohmer's new film, The Marquise ot 0 . ~ breaks precedent with the "six moral tales" he made before it...

...In Rohmer's adaptation, the opposition between angels and devils is reinforced by new ones between domesticity and warfare, birth and death, Eros and Thanatos...

...As with the present, the past...

...each one tries to top the other until Hirst is ready to horsewhip Spooner for an insult to a woman whom neither of them may ever have known...

...A manic depressive who ended his life at age thirty-five in a suicide pact with a woman, Kleist probably saw the rape of the Marquise in his story as having a redemptive value...

...They combine themes of long-standing in the non-Catholic literature with contemporary liberationist elements...

...Any future here, as the age of the poets and some of their lines ("last lap of a race") suggest, is death...

...Dangerous, too, for if I understand Pinter correctly, I may have invented the early Pinter plays in retrospect...

...Since No Man's Land never moved me, as The Caretaker does, as Old Times did in production, I found myself wondering if the virtuosity of the two performers had upstaged the play completely...

...As Hirst, Richardson raises the reaction stare and the throwaway line to character definition...

...The dominant 7 January 1977:22 characteristic of that story is a kind of opacitymwhat I before called its matter-of-factness--which perhaps explains why Kleist was also much admired by Kafka...

...For if desire, as natural as breath or sleep itself, is sinful, then the Christian, like a man in the grasp of a usurer, must always run back to the Church, the only source of that grace which can alone give him reprieve" (50-51...

...The over-all thesis is that Mary, the Galilean maid, has been transformed by the Church into an oppressive ideal from which Catholic women in particular suffer, although the male of ehe species does not escape unscathed...

...They are not marionettes and they do not broadcast my opinions...

...This is a convention that we can no longer take seriously today, and as such it is not unlike what happens when Jerome touches the knee of Claire, who doesn't even notice he has done so...

...And Kleist's novella precedes Rohmer's new film in much the same spirit...

...Nor are her interpretations unusual...

...It leaves him room to shoulder his way in with discretion and take over the story without our even noticing, rather the way Jerome touches Claire's knee...

...An outsider, a stranger, who may not be a stranger really (v...

...In Claire's Knee, a character recites at the beginning the plot of a story she is writing, and it anticipates what happens in the film...

...Its undeniable power and beauty Commonweal" 23...

...Somewhere around the house there is said to be an album in which memories are caught, frozen fixed, but we never see it since memories, in Pinter and in fact, have a way of borrowing from fiction...

...Many, whether friends or foes, will read it as a devastating attack on the Mother of Our Lord, on the Roman Church and even on Christianity itself...

...It is through such disparities in human nature that Rohmer lets himself into Kleist's story...

...The moral neutrality which the breaking of the Chinese vase in La Collectioneuse preserves in Rohmer himself is dictated by his perception of the moral ambiguity of life...

...That touching of Claire's knee seems to touch upon Rohmer's adaptation of Kleist in several ways...

...Yet at the same time they are also "free" in the sense that they embody Kleist's original version of their story as well as Rohmer's own, and leave it to us to choose between the two...

...Thus carnal knowledge becomes a mere trifle, as that Victorian euphemism about "trifling with a woman's affections" would have it...

...Or at least Kleist's story lends itself to such a perception...

...Haydee has at this point been passed along by the hero, Adrien, to a rich American whose patronage Adrien is courting...

...It would be hard to imagine an atmosphere less usual than this in a Rohmer film...

...and several chapters later she finds herself pregnant...

...Pinter characters are regularly beset by uncertainty about their identities --Stanley's shifting history in The Birthday Party, the old man's lost papers in The Caretaker--and about their memories, as in Landscape, Sience and Old Times...

...Even so, audiences are drawn into the best of his plays, moved sometimes by emotions that they cannot define for themselves...