Screen

...It stars Romy Schneider and Yves Montand, who played the lead in all Costa-Gavras's political films of a decade ago...

...Costa-Gavras wants to spare us, along with his characters, the need to think too much about life's general unpleasantness...

...Z (1968), The Confession (1970) and State of Siege (1973), were all rather conventionally designed color films because, I suspect, Costa-Gavras wanted to reach the widest possible audience with them...

...That's what his latest film, Clair de Femme, suggests...

...It has given up art for light comedy and melodrama...

...Laurent suit, but with the cigar ashes still on his shirt front and grubby $100 bills overflowing from his pockets...

...Simply by playing the role, Montand lost thirty pounds...

...The true story of an Eastern European statesman who was purged by his own government, The Confession shows us in relentless detail the torture this man endured during his official "interrogation...

...He was never exactly a member of the New Wave, for he arrived on the scene a little too late...

...Be grateful that I spared you Claude Lelouch's Robert et Robert...

...I don't mean to suggest by this comparison that I would like 20 June 1980: 373 to see more brutality and violence in current French movies, but only that what made The Confession remarkable was its ability to make brutality and violence stand for something human on the screen...

...Clair de Femme is a movie that_ thinks about love and death the way a lot of people, restless but terrified of loneliness, think about divorce—as an abyss that one should be able to leap across by going directly from a spouse to a full-time lover...

...After the first time, however, he meets Lydia Towarski (Romy Schneider), a woman he picks up on impulse outside a cafe...

...I can't believe that someone could change so much in such a short time...

...It's a movie that panders to our need for instant gratifications, instant alternatives that will relieve us of life's suffering...

...The film made an art form out of its matter-of-fact treatment of its hero's physical and emotional deterioration because they gave us a way to share CostaGavras's great admiration for a great man...

...When we first meet Michel, as he is about to board an airplane for South America, he suddenly turns around and grabs a cab back to Paris instead...

...But his first film in 1965, The Sleeping Car Murders, showed his sympathies with the new cinema in France...

...That's what he was staying away for...

...I have the same trouble with political institutions...

...Each film told a true Story of political repression, and precisely because of their cinematic modesty, their readiness to sacrifice technique and journalism to political goals, each was a compelling film...

...But French filmmaking, represented by the few films that are available here, takes on a singular personality for me...

...When Godard's Weekend played in a prominent theater on the East Side of Manhattan, or when a succession of Chabrol and Truffaut films had similar bookings, it seemed astounding, and encouraging...

...House and Senate together keep collapsing into just one person, Senator Claghorn in an Yves St...

...Now, when there is so much French dreck around, it seems almost unkind to single out poor Lelouch, who had the foresight to go it alone, to pioneer in this kitsch at a time when it was, ironically, a kind of avant garde...

...Although they soon land in bed, the attempt at lovemaking isn't successful because each of them has a past he or she must first get over...

...It has turned from a gifted intellectual into a sentimental fool...

...But when Lelouch was handily able to reach the same Gucci-shoes audience, and then some, one's heart should have sunk...

...It wasn't, of course, as the subsequent careers of even close collaborators like Truffaut and Godard have shown...

...This time Montand plays a purely fictitious character from a Romain Gary novel...

...Clair de Femme, like most French movies I see today, is only trying to spare us such disconcerting experiences...

...Now the mood of political urgency in which those films were made has passed, and Costa-Gavras seems to be a director who is stranded with neither a style nor a story...

...Compare this treatment to that given the character played by Yves Montand in The Confession, which is Costa-Gavras's best film...

...By the time he reveals this to Lydia and us, the wife is in fact dead, having killed herself with his collaboration...

...In a subsequent series of features made in the late sixties and early seventies, Costa-Gavras seemed to put aside his interest in stylistic development, or at least subordinated it to other considerations...

...A romance quickly ensues and becomes what each subsequent return from Orly is all about...

...A sign of how Costa-Gavras's instincts in his movies have changed is to be seen in the extreme delicacy with which he treats his story...

...The history of French cinema almost encourages this misconception, this anthropomorphosis, because back in the early sixties the New Wave tried to represent itelf as being a single personality...

...She has a husband brain-damaged in an automobile wreck, and he has a wife dying of cancer in that apartment...

...In less than a decade French cinema has lost its wit, its intelligence, and its hair...

...A director whose work demonstrates the sorry state into which French cinema has fallen—one that really does seem to condense it all into a single career—is Costa-Gavras...

...He is Michel Folain, a man who is going through some bizarre attraction-repulsion with an apartment in central Paris...

...To release such schlock in those days took a certain gall that might almost, in retrospect, be mistaken for courage...

...Even in 1966, however, A Man and A Woman did enjoy a certain commercial success in this country that might have given one pause...

...I know I've complained about this before, recently...

...One should have steeled oneself against the onslaught of drivel that we have witnessed since then...

...It's ok for him to lose his wife as soon as he has someone else to turn to...

...Lelouch was someone to object to even back in 1966, when the New Wave was still in its prime, and he had just released A Man and A Woman...

...But it's all right...

...In the course of the film, he repeats this ritual at Orly airport three or four times, returning on each occasion without having left...

...It has developed an emotional paunch...

...The Congress, for instance, just won't stay fixed in my mind as a constantly changing roster of hundreds of people with a capacity for every possible version of man's fate...

...Lydia's deranged husband is living in the lap of luxury without a visible scar on him, and Michel's wife is never allowed to become more than a form under a sheet out of focus in the background...

...There he cruises past the apartment with unquenchable yearning on his face, but doesn't stop...

...But if the solidarity of those days makes me think of French filmmaking as an old friend now, it has become a friend with whom I find maintaining old loyalities increasingly difficult, no matter how badly I want to do so...

...Domestic films I see too many of, and get Commonweal: 372 too much background information on them, to make such a mistake...

...It suggested that gains in movie art made by the New Wave might actually be consolidated by those who came after...

...Actually, it's not so much a past as an unmanageable present...

...The film cultures that reduce themselves to stereotypes like this are always foreign ones...

...Everything is all right for both him and Lydia, for now they have each other...

...The Confession was especially so...

...Blier's Coup de Tête, which I wrote about in March, was bad enough...

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

...A policier with a surreal edge to it, the film followed through on some ideas Godard and Truffaut had pursued, yet had a distinct, rather politicized style all its own...

...Nobody expected films as demanding as Godard's, or even Chabrol's, to reach a wide audience...