Screen

...Her best scene, however, involves a set of dresses, a comic vignette that testifies to how little she has realized her best gifts in film roles...

...This farcical violence gives an edgy tone to the film, and almost pushes it beyond comedy...

...Yet the writing of Michael Cristofer and acting of Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep so dignify their emotions that you tend to forget the hidden issue...

...TOM O'BRIEN Dance DANCING BOUND NEW BOOKS ON THE MASTERS W HEN George Balanchine died last April, there existed a single book about him, published twenty years ago.The realization among publishing houses that he was one of the major artistic voices of the twentieth century has begun slowly but is gathering momentum...

...The better movie is First Born, which details how two sons cope when their mother (Terri Garr) becomes obsessed with a big-talking, apparently friendly, and finally slimy drifter (Peter Weller...

...Garr is miscast...

...Love about their problems, but neither they nor she knows their real identities, including Ev~, her roommate...

...But The Killing Fields falls into a different category: it's an account of the genocide of three million people, and -- though the tension slackens in the second half - - it's searing and unforgettable...

...De Niro and Streep are emotionally drawn to each other, but there's no headlong rush to bed, and, on her part at least, there is strong guilt...

...Ironically, the terror in the first half of The Killing Fields inured me to the scenes of hardship in the second half and seemed to steal away some of their power...

...Every time the phone or doorbell rings, you have to brace for another hairbreadth escape...

...To make matters more complicated, all the women that Mickey kisses (and proposes to) are also being pursued by a hood named Zack (Patrick Bachau...

...he coarsens his hands, feigns ignorance of French and English, and avoids the sweetly toned invitations to doctors, professors, and students to acknowledge the past and "serve the revolution...

...But somehow he makes his determined effort to save things seem grandly dignified...

...Weller is all too believable as the heavy: he's every late-sixties faker you wished you'd never met...

...Choose Me is a pseudo-sleazy film that winds up as an interesting, oddly tender, off-beat comedy...

...The screenplay makes clear how guilty Schanberg (Sam Waterston) came to feel for failing to force Pran out when he forced out his own family in one of the last helicopters...

...Director Volker Schlondorff vividly captures Proust's turn-of-the-century Parisian ambience - - the salons, concert rooms, exquisite gardens and palaces, the gestures of servants as they heat razors for an aristocrat's late morning shave...

...Ngor had similarly to hide his background to survive the rural killing fields...

...Later restagings of the work in 1935, 1945, and 1956 preserved the essential folk character of the ballet...

...As Swann, Jeremy Irons - - practically canonized through the exquisite marketing of T.V.'s Brideshead Revisited -fails miserably in his first major film role...

...But director Alan Rudolph manages the shifts in tone and somehow diminishes the distasteful aspects of these characters and their lifestyles...

...Pran's role is played here by another actual survivor, Dr...

...Once in Khmer Rouge hands, he plays deaf and dumb to fit in with the peasants who are spared total annihilation...

...Collett doesn't have to do much to look good given the liquor, drugs, and wild partying that suddenly pervade the house...

...The struggles of the third world have made for some scarifying film-making in the last several years - - witness El Norte, The Year of Living Dangerously, Missing, and Under Fire...

...The film involves a modern version of boy-meets-girl: two married careerists accidentally meet in a New York bookstore, then fall into what used to be called adultery...

...But what gives First Born its power is the acting of newcomer Chris Collett in the title role, Garr's older son, a later high school adolescent...

...Tchaikovsky's Suite No...

...The illusion of heroism is also maintained by the chastity of the film...

...Fortunately for Schanberg, Pran was able to save him and other reporters from the first wave of executions...

...But what works so well in his novels -- those splendid recta-examinations of mind moving over, then through the surfaces of things like madeleines - - comes across in Swarm in Love as mere superficiality, without depth or penetration...

...In several nerve-racking scenes, they desperately attempt to fake a photo, but the paper, the last they can find, keeps fading pathetically, and Prarr has to be abandoned to the tender mercies of a pogrom...

...When she's on the phone, she gets a world of meaning merely from a string of varied "yesses...

...Just one scene of bombing beggars all description...

...In 1981 when he reexamined the score, Balanchine choreographed an entirely different ballet, rearranging the order of the music and retaining a period costume only for the gigue solo dancer...

...Streep manages the realism handily...

...he sure knew how a cookie crumbled...

...So Mickey lets himself go, pursuing, among others, Dr...

...When De Niro mutedly tells his wife that "nothing 'like that' went on," she accurately comments, "No, it's much worse," and true to the film's realism, slaps him five minutes later...

...Unfortunately for Pran, the reporters could not obtain a forged passport for him once they were safely inside the French embassy awaiting evacuation...

...First Born is genuine domestic gothic, ranch-house-style, a sincere stab at a serious adolescent film...

...Maiorano, assisted by Valerie Brooks, presents the slow gestation of the ballet (one minute of finished work per studio hour) including its technical difficulties, emotional crises, musical discussions, costume fittings, humorous asides, stage rehearsals, and unforeseen technical hitches in erecting and lighting the huge hollow tube plastic Commonweal: 688...

...The film concludes with the epigraph that the agony of Cambodia continues...

...In numbers the ballet used diminished forces but used them to create a large artistic impact from the opening devotional solo by Suzanne Farrell to the closing joyous finale...

...Researching some filed tapes in New York, Schanberg plays back a presidential press conference in which a voice claims that "Cambodia is the Nixon doctrine in its purest form...

...Ironically -- contrary to the fifties' and sixties' image of the adolescent rebel -- Collett restores normality...

...its heroine and his preferred, Eve, (Lesley Anne Warren), can't make a commitment to anyone at all...

...Love about their problems, but neither they nor she know no first-hand knowledge of...

...Even though the scenes in the first half are familiar - - ambassadors running to hop the last plane out, American clients pawing at embassy gates to get inside, reporters cocky about filing their stories despite the coming of Apocalypse -- their tension was almost overwhelming...

...If De Niro or Streep made a film where they were the rejected spouses, that would be a piece of realism worth having, with a bite to rival First Born...

...Scenes in the second half contain a powerful portrayal by Dr...

...Like Pran, he eventually escaped, through paddies stacked with skulls, across the Thai border...

...Balanchine's last great creative effort was the Tchaikovsky Festival, presented by New York City Ballet in 1981, and his "Mozartiana...

...Cristofer's style is both witty and natural...

...Haing S. Ngor, and through his eyes we experience the so-called "Year Zero" - - the Khmer Rouge attempt to wipe out previous history, wipe out memory, and wipe out those inclined to remember thetimes before their rise to power...

...Falling in Love is a glamorous, even Platonic, heart-throb, and you can't help but root for the principals...

...Fittingly enough, the first volumes to emerge are by two of Balanchine's own dancers...

...As prime mover, De Niro carries the film: somehow he makes abandoning a perfectly satisfactory spouse seem heroic...

...Producer David Puttnam and Director Roland Jaffe deserve credit for evoking an Asian flavor in the film and for using the paraphernalia of special effects for high moral ends...

...a young Broadway veteran, he actually catches how people talk -- no mean achievement in the screenplay form -- their half statements, ahems, and awkward pauses...

...On radio, Dr...

...There are small points to criticize in The Killing Fields, particularly an over-reliance on music for climaxes that would be improved by understatement...

...First Born and Falling in Love are two Paramount films in the Ordinary People vein: family melodramas that get more mileage from their suburban settings and soap opera plots than you might expect...

...The movie proves, however, the old truism that good writing and acting can make even a trite story interesting...

...The movie's one redeeming feature: Ornelia Muti as the courtesan Odette' De Crecy, with whom Swann falls in love, and whose purposes not only mystify him but herself as well...

...Everyone in the film calls Dr...

...But it did leave me wondering: what about the wife...

...excellent as a comedienne, passable in her initial scenes as her sons' sidekick, she is simply unbelievable as a fallen woman...

...Despite her efforts, Swann in Love is the second movie version of a literary classic (after The Bostonians), to sink this year, just about five minutes out of port...

...But it fails to point out the intense irony that Nixon bombed Cambodia to stave off a "bloodbath" that never happened in Vietnam, and that the United States still condemns the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that ended the Khmer Rouge bloodbath...

...As he accurately intuits, the ruse is only a cover for a final "selection...

...In real life, Dr...

...depth requires more than his appearance of torment, snooty sophistication, and Hamlet-like indecision...

...Robert Maiorano, a long-time solo dancer with the company, followed Balanchine through every class and rehearsal observing and recording in exceptional detail the process of a genius at work...

...In Balanchine's Mozartiana (Freundlich Books, $18.95, 188 pp...

...The first half of the movie details the friendship of Pran and Schanberg, especially their close association in publicizing Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia in 1973 and the last fear-filled days in Phnom Penh in 1975 as the Americanbacked government collapsed...

...Nancy Love (Genevieve Bujold), hostess of the radio sex-talk show, "The Love Line...

...Eventually about Commonweal: 686 marriage, it begins as sexual slapstick: its hero Mickey (Keith Carradine), proposes to everyone he kisses...

...The Killing Fields places part of the blame for the atrocities on American bombing policies, with Schanberg referring to "the insanity that seven million pounds of bombs can cause...

...But he fails to capture Proust's innerness...

...The film is so visually top-heavy and so slowly paced it turns into the most gorgeous snooze in recent cinema...

...Ngor, a Cambodian refugee now living in California who had never acted before...

...Alternatively annoying and amusing, disgusting and enchanting, Choose Me becomes a weird but fruitful meditation on loneliness, spontaneity, and taking risks...

...the Thai youngsters who were recruited to perform as Khmer Rouge cadres are all too coldbloodedly convincing...

...If there is a political angle to the film, it's the younger generation's hostility to the"older" generation's proneness to radical instability...

...Falling in Love has a slighter subject...

...The film, a mustsee but a hard look-at, is based on "The Life and Death of Dith Pran," Sydney Schanberg's New York Times Magazine account of the takeover of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge and the harrowing survival of Schanberg's Cambodian assistant in the slaughter that followed...

...children o f " Year Zero" still occupy Thai refuges...

...4 0 p . 61 ("Mozartiana") first engaged Balanchine's interest in 1933...

...A word or two about some other interesting or surprising movies this fall: You have to hand it to Proust...