Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen TOO FAR GONE ROBERT BRESSON & ALAIN TANNER TWO NEW FILMS by old masters at the New York Film Festival seemed to me to suffer the same fate. Neither was able to go the distance, or rather,...
...It is a premise strikingly appropriate to Bresson's style as a filmmaker...
...The film remains true to its earlier ambiguities...
...Drunk and alone, he falls out of bed in the middle of the night, then stumbles to his feet and smashes whisky bottles against the wall...
...In these new films, the trust seems to be betrayed...
...One was Robert Bresson's UArgent, which begins in a very promising way...
...Neither was able to go the distance, or rather, each went too great a distance...
...They are images without differentiation or order .or structure, images that are "white," like the city...
...But then the film begins eliminating characters, concentrating more and more on just one figure, the delivery man, Yvon (Christian Patey...
...Drawing its theme from a Tolstoy story entitled "Faux Billet," the movie at first follows the migrations of some forged money as it is passed from two teenagers to a shop owner and then from him to his oil delivery man...
...This is a brilliant device...
...It creates in their stead a completely innocent old woman whose only purpose in life, or at least in this film, is to be Yvon's victim...
...The film itself does not become aimless like Paul's life because of the subtlety not only of Tanner's script and direction, but of Bruno Ganz's acting...
...Nothing is definite in this ending...
...While Paul is drifting into these uncharted emotional waters, Tanner gives us only a few compass points by which to keep our own bearings...
...In Tanner's films, the physical place, the geographical location, means as much as the action...
...These take the form of a series of home movies that Paul makes and sends to his wife in Switzerland...
...By the third reel he shoots, his point of view has become the only discernible subject...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...It is Alain Tanner's In the White City...
...The room in which he lives is big and bare and rather empty...
...I would have ended the film here, but Tanner goes on, providing Paul with a recovery of sorts and ending with a fourth insert of Super-8 footage...
...The characteristic Bresson frame is an empty one, a medium shot in which the camera lingers on the scene for a few moments after the actors have departed...
...Tanner shot the story in chronological order so that Ganz could feel Paul's malaise grow within him, so that he could feel his way toward the signs of it in his performance...
...It is a story that revolves not around a single character or momentous event, but only around a handful of forged bills, a mere prop, an inert detail of the type on which his camera might rest after the actors had walked from the frame...
...He chats up a chamber maid and begins sleeping with her...
...We can feel the director manipulating the story and the cinematography...
...The subjective element is increased...
...A protracted ending diminished the effect of what had come before...
...He goest out to dinner with the chambermaid, Rosa (Teresa Madruga), and her friends, all of whom babble in Portuguese, a language he doesn't understand...
...In the first reel, made aboard ship, Paul hands the camera to someone else...
...It is an auspicious beginning...
...He lets his ship sail without him...
...i The premise of this plot is very like a wonderful Expres...
...they are a blank, a void, and therefore a fitting set for the emptiness we see beginning to open inside Paul...
...He checks into a pension on the harbor...
...Each man has, for once, gone too far...
...But this is inappropriate...
...The harbor outside is the same, which is why Tanner is attracted to it as a background...
...The plot therefore has a certain integrity like that of Bresson's style...
...Tanner's best work, like Bresson's, has depended on self-restraint...
...The place is part of the action, as the title of his best earlier color film, Le Milieu du Monde, suggests...
...and yet it, too, might better have ended sooner...
...He goes drinking and chats with some whores...
...In the next reel that Paul begins, just after going ashore, he holds the camera at arm's length in order to film himself as he walks along...
...Or he just stares out at the harbor...
...It's apparent from fairly early in the film that Paul is cracking up...
...A good beginning has, for each, led to a disappointment...
...And in L'Argent, he begins with a story that also has at its center a kind of void...
...The film is about a ship's engineer named Paul (Bruno Ganz) who has a port of call in Lisbon, "the white city...
...The dissolution of his mind is slow, unspectacular, almost imperceptible at times...
...On the other hand, this last home movie is also an intervention on Tanner's part...
...There are moments of action, as when he's followed from a snooker parlor and mugged because he's left his wallet sticking out, almost as if he were inviting such a catastrophe...
...He introduces a new character who lives outside the tainted universe in which we have been so far...
...He gets into a scuffle in a bar...
...As Paul becomes more and more irresolute, the film becomes more intense...
...Bresson's movies are about absence...
...sionist movie of the late 1920s called Uberfall, about a coin that passes from hand to hand among the low life of a German city...
...He rides the tram and walks the streets, not really touring, just wandering around...
...It's about a town that is topographically central and spiritually on the periphery, almost off the map...
...Style and content complement each other...
...The film leaves behind several unfinished stories of characters about whom we would like to have known more...
...they are about the life of the spirit that pervades the world only beyond or between or after physical presences...
...But most of the time, nothing ostensible is happening...
...Both should have been over sooner than they were...
...Both the harbor and the city of Lisbon are "white" in this film...
...In the home movies now, we see both the world and Paul himself from his own point of view...
...THE OTHER FILM doesn't end as badly as Bresson's does...
...The director admitted this at a Festival press conference...
...Thus does Bresson sacrifice-indeed, throw away-that integrity of plot, character, and style that seemed so fine at the beginning .I'm saddened to say that this is the pattern this great director's whole career has been taking in his last couple of films...
...We give ourselves over to the film and trust it because we believe implicitly that the filmmaker will not meddle in his characters' fate...
...This one is made as Paul is on the way home to Switzerland, after he has sold his camera to settle his hotel bill...
...But just the fact that Tanner includes these blown-up Super-8s in his film introduces an eerily subjective element into our experience of Paul...
...Into this story are drawn a number of other people-a shop assistant, the teenagers' parents, the delivery man's wife-who are all either corrupted or ruined by their contact with the fake currency...
...The result is a typical postcard in motion-picture form-awkward, hesitant, self-conscious...
...The final image is one in which, he said,' 'I myself am appropriating the world as a filmmaker...
...It is he who gets caught with the bills, and the consequences so utterly transform his life that Bresson wants us to see him as a totally different, debased character at the end . To get this across, Bresson begins to make a whole new movie in the last quarter of L Argent...
...Paul sits on the little balcony of his room and plays his harmonica...
...In a sense this takes the subjective experience one step further, for now the movies exist only in Paul's mind...
...The movies this time are shots of the cobblestones passing under the tram or waves beneath the ferryboat in the harbor...
Vol. 110 • November 1983 • No. 19
