ANGST-PUSHERS & AUSTENITES

...There is clearly nothing wrong with that so long as the character is movingly portrayed, as he is in these examples...

...Alphaville...

...The Big Heat—startle their audience in ways only movies have at their full command...

...Rather, it is an affair of will, the merest velleity...

...The story here sounds "inspired" whereas Bergman gave it a dramatic context—the incestuous sister having her vision just as a helicopter, buzzing violently, with its spindly legs very like a spider's, landed outside the window to fly her to a mental hospital...

...Pavese, lacking that option, might allow the narrator's eye to wander out into the landscape, into some trifling observation...

...But all of Play It As It Lays takes place on the couch without saying so...

...All of Rohmer's films are essentially the same...

...Again this belongs to plot and character, which are never properly established in Play It As It Lays...

...Anthony Perkins announcing that he has discovered nothingness has about the tact of a Tennessee Williams spinster wailing to us, "I'm really a very lonely woman...

...Various artificial settings, even a film-within-film, have been devised so that the heroine may freely associate about her past life, fill in gaps in the accountability of her present behavior, and generally put the viewer on the spot as analyst...

...The revolutions which Renoir and, a generation later, Godard looked forward to have been a long while in coming...

...There, however, at least we knew where we stood...

...It is quick to "explain" almost anything, and lends itself readily to the allegorization of things as they are...

...The literary device has been dramatically placed and therefore commands our attention and our appreciation...

...Conrad in The Secret Agent, preparing the murder of Mr...

...He brings the plot around in Chloe with an epiphany, like the contact with Claire's knee but even more concentrated in time...

...Says Maria: "I've never been much impressed with catatonia as a life-style...

...they are pointed straight at us, the audience...

...The answer lies in Miss Didion's borrowings, or as I had much rather call them, her plagiarisms...

...The movie is Play It As It Lays, and we can say plainly enough what it bodes...

...I find this depressing to contem plate, maybe because it reveals the author in her American and psychoanalytically optimistic phase—Europe and existentialism are in this respect a false bottom...

...Miller has the power of a fluid design carried through the articulations of its separate mosaic images...

...Only a few things in life reduce us to our last privacy, but I should prefer to have movies treating them with a little more conscious tact, since we all grow sick on watching them as a matter of course...

...I have not seen anywhere remarked what seems to me at once a very obvious and a very queer fact, that he makes use of none of the resources which are the unique property of a film director...

...The suicide in Winter Light was offstage...

...Maria, though much is made of her sensitivity, strikes me as on the whole less interesting than that baseball player...

...This movie is good fun all the same, the way Rohmer always is, the way (to make a leap in magnitude) Bergman was fun in Smiles of a Summer Night...

...This seemed to me just and necessary, a part of our general mystery...

...When image and word fail alike, we have to rest with the gross consolation of symbols...

...but in fact she intrigues us far more than does the hero...

...The question was whether to submit to the embraces of a charming and intelligent woman in the warmth of her own home, or remain faithful to a lovely but less neatly accessible true love...

...Can we bear the responsibility...

...Yet in a novel this would have been heavy going —we shouldn't be found extending our confidence so easily...

...This is what I mean by an embarrassing cinematic treatment of a literary idea...

...A more resourceful artist like Antonioni will avoid quite so tactless an approach...

...Perry, none too soon, and arrive at a director who shares with them a certain formal limitation but possesses, in an almost frightening measure, the virtue of tact...

...The main event of the movie is Maria's abortion, during which we see the last of the fetus scraped into a wastebasket...

...they know each other too well...

...Of course the movie does have a bit of uplift at the end...

...There was a twist, though, in My Night at Maud's, in a denouement which revealed to Trintignant that his true love had been conducting an affair with the other woman's husband, so that he was left alone as the missing link of chastity...

...A young girl preparing for life as a prostitute, listening to the guardian woman who assures her tenderly yet sternly that she will like it, puts on the very best face she can, while somewhere outside men are singing and a drunkenly happy laborer dances a slow jig in the mud...

...The effects they aim at are, strictly speaking, literary and not at all plastic...

...YET there are things beyond a success of this order which we all care more about...

...But this is Rohmer's constant subject: the sexual temptation, entertained in the short run before being permanently laid to rest...

...I am in some doubt as to the prospect facing MOVIES Rohmer, but I hope that he will do the same...

...It brought Miss Didion two or three good essays and a great many bad ones: reading about her very public fatigue is fatiguing...

...Once, though, having paid our respects to the autonomy of cinema, we catch a good number of films trying to do exactly what novels have always done...

...But Joan Didion is a journalist not a poet of the neurotic edge...

...Her manner owes a good deal to Nausea, yet she cannot follow Sartre in rendering the separateness which is her subject down into concrete images...

...In Claire's Knee the ironies have got even softer and in Chloe they turn to fluff, about to blow away...

...the people around her (scratch one saintly suicide) really are visibly worse...

...In the terms set by this film her affectless vulnerability is the higher sanity...

...Actually, we get not so much ambivalence as hesitation—the chronic and unnerving hesitation of a coward...

...No comment needed there, surely...

...And yes, she must even show off the dreadful knowing when she gets herself a drink—pointedly dropping a shrimp in the liquid to make a miniature fetus...

...Now, however, I must out with the entire complaint...

...She is quick-witted, sexy, and without affectation, and she is played by Zouzou in a performance for the fiery like of which we have to recall Jean Seberg in Breathless (though in truth Chloe is a more compelling type than the Godard doll, and Zouzou knows it...

...Her screenplay is full of aimless chatter, yet neither she nor her heroine rises above the sump to comprehend it...

...Where does it all come from, this breezy acquiescence in joylessness...

...Yet something has gone awry, for Chloe is more fascinating than, according to Rohmer's moral, she has any right to be...

...I wonder the more MOVIES at this seeming poverty of means when a publicity notice refers to his doctoral dissertation on F. W. Murnau, that most visual of directors...

...toward which end she must charm us as well, if the story is to be effective...

...This spineless bourgeois is turning up at the center of too many European films, and in the work of too many directors whose work I normally loved to attend: he was there in La Dolce Vita, and in Truffaut's The Soft Skin, and he returned for what looked to be a last round in Bertolucci's extraordinary The Conformist...

...Life-style" is one of those horrible fungus words which a film like this only seems to hold itself above...

...We have only one problem...

...And drains (the doctor was caught washing his hands...

...Eric Rohmer was a leader of the Cahiers du Cinema group that once counted among its members Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol...

...Through a Glass Darkly is there in full battle dress when Maria bubbles about the man who saw God in the form of a spider...

...q...

...Truffaut in Shoot the Piano Player, Chaplin in City Lights, Bergman in Naked Night and The Seventh Seal—even, God knows, Mabuse, the Gambler...

...nothing is to be done...

...A glance at the names tells us how far we have yet to come in this country toward merging the art of film criticism with the art of film...

...Among recent films McCabe and Mrs...

...Miller is a greater film than Chloe as an eagle is more astonishing than a well-behaved truth...

...The film was about a baseball star whose surest victory had to be won on the couch...

...One such symbol is the desert Maria is always driving through...

...Unfortunately, his repertoire so far is narrowly circumscribed...

...She writes out of a neurasthenic or claustrophobic sense of the world of objects—highways, "the media," Antonioni smokestacks, above all lifeless people—closing in about her and forming along their terrible dull ranks to stop her breathing...

...Rhetorically, we need hardly add, since she answers, Why not...

...Joan Didion, who adapted the screenplay from her own novel, has just one serviceable area of feeling...

...We should be grateful to the director who made a film about Chloe, about Zazie grown up, instead of soothing us with the sweet anxieties of an executive pondering the violation of his own code of honor...

...the heroine asks herself...

...we, too, want to breathe, and she won't let us, and out of sheer monotony the artistic rewards get slimmer with each passing paragraph...

...Catching himself in the mirror, he sees that in spite of all his desires he is at bottom a foolishly and contentedly home-bound man...

...At his last rendezvous with Chloe, stripping for action, he will discover the same pose in a different mirror, change his mind, and head for home...

...Borrowing, after all, happens when one artist puts another to use for his own ends, But this movie doesn't put to use...

...Play It As It Lays in con trast has been rather deliberately filled with symbols...

...The deeper trouble here is a nagging literalism...

...But that is no great matter...

...it uses, it sucks dry...

...If the line were in a more enjoyable, that is, a more blatantly trashy film, it would almost certainly be camp...

...Tat movies can accomplish certain narrative chores more smoothly than novels is a truism, but when we begin looking at specific moments from specific films, the apparently slight advantage in facility takes on the character of a difference in kind...

...The gap has widened between Maud and Chloe: no longer does the hero resist seduction for reasons of the heart which the mind will never understand...

...And this brings us to a single quality special to Rohmer's work: his subject has made him the master of what might be called the soft irony...

...The wider orientation shots are perfunctory from start to finish...

...Miss Didion and her director, Frank Perry, try for the same effect but simply don't know how to manage it...

...We can end with a critical borrowing, unfairly wrenched: McCabe and Mrs...

...Finally (we have now left Maria for a better) : "That's what I like about you, Carter...

...The grand larceny, once we get past Antonioni in the early scenes, is a wholesale expropriation of Bergman...

...The hero has got hold of an English baby-sitter with whom only his wife can communicate, and for the sake of wife and baby-sitter and baby all together, and to break the ice, he enters the baby's room with a sweater pulled halfway over his head...

...The story will be about a child who lives all alone on an island, surrounded on every side by rocks the color of flesh, and who after losing the only company of her life, a ghostly ship in the cove, hears the rocks crying out to her with the sound of everybody and everything...

...My favorite happens to be My Night at Maud's, which had Jean-Louis Trintignant exquisitely treading the line between fidelity and—perhaps the obverse here would be stolidity...

...And yet that is only the beginning—we must be witnesses, too, as he takes one handful of capsules, takes another, sets himself down to expire, and expires...

...and then, he is a wonderful observer of actors in the medium close-up...

...Again: "Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game...

...Films about this character, however much they try for the subtle or jostling ambiguity, are at last failures in persuasion, because we don't have on our hands a case of Strether nodding...

...The intensities of the last half-hour in Bergman almost redeem the holy mess that went before it...

...Antonioni might do this by resting his camera on a speaker long after he had finished and someone else had begun talking...

...But after this, I confess, my list runs wild...

...Another is a big ugly rattlesnake that crawls through said desert at strategic intervals, when Maria is having a low time altogether elsewhere...

...I trace one detail to a source so recent it hardly looks credible, yet suspicion dies hard: those false teeth lying scattered on the pavement, slipped from the head of an anonymous highway victim, can be found in Daniel Fuchs's Hollywood novel of a few years back...

...The story concerns a high-fashion model, Maria Wyeth, who grew up in a small desert town, came to hate the success her beauty made available, and at some point evidently had a breakdown...

...Should we...

...He dies in her lap and she goes on living, "playing," as the final soliloquy archly has it, a sadder and a wiser girl...

...The mood has its convincing moments but it is not, I venture to say, inexhaustible...

...This, however, interests me less at the moment than the problem of style in Rohmer's films...

...By that route the conversation slows down to meet the pace of the camera...

...Why live...

...The temptation was not succumbed to, nor is it ever in these three films...

...The pastor came upon the dead man on a river bank, near his parked car, and the roaring din of the rapids drowned out even his own thoughts as he stared ahead vacantly...

...His movies, in short, bear the same relation to the possibilities of cinema that closet drama bears to the possibilities of theater...

...Those coy last words, so weirdly irrelevant, so awkward, so sweet to spite all the sour, call to mind a less ponderous but even more psychoanalytic Anthony Perkins movie, Fear Strikes Out...

...Existentialism has made it to Hollywood at last: twenty years late, to be sure, but with the true narcissistic glow of discovery...

...The camera is quick to spot motives...

...Something of this sort must have been what Eliot had in mind when he spoke of the "objective correlative": only, he would have wanted the detail to rise precisely from the material...

...all are, to a degree, satisfying...

...Verloc, had to lay out the right weapon pages in advance, and view it with the eye of the murderer without yet urging it forcibly on the reader, so that the crime would still come across as a shock...

...Maria narrates, yet the symbols re main beyond her grasp...

...A list of these things would surely include: suicide, the sexual act, praying...

...in Play It MOVIES 221 As It Lays, right as clockwork, we get more of the numbing same...

...His camera, stationed a bit above or a bit below or straight opposite the face that is speaking, keeps its domestic peace and scarcely moves at all...

...At all events, Rohmer touched the 222 critics and then the public with parts four and five of his Moral Tales, and he has recently delivered the sixth and last part under the title L'Amour, L'Apres-midi, which is curiously translated as Chloe in the Afternoon...

...His screenplays are always full, they are written out, we enjoy listening to them...

...The difficulty may be that Trintignant, together with the Christian obsession written into his part (there was an enormously long and free discussion of Pascal), was able to fill out the role of the tempted bourgeois with more idiosyncratic zest than it deserved...

...Alas, suicides leave behind no runes...

...She is heading for the badlands, too—will he tell the Great Secret...

...Similarly with Winter Light, which is given a fling in the relationship between Maria and her ex-husband Carter...

...Play It As It Lays is shot through with objective correlatives but they are, as it were, unloaded on the heroine MOVIES unawares: we do not feel them as things at all peculiar to her mind...

...To start with a salient bad example: Anthony Perkins is readying himself for the overdose of tranquilizer capsules that will clear the screen of his agony...

...We've been out there," he says tremulously sobbing out the words, "where nothing is...

...Hitchcock, photographing the same scene, had Sylvia Sidney glance over at the knife for a split second, uncomfortably, then showed the silver instrument glinting under the light, and performed in a few smart instants an operation that had taken the novelist all day to achieve inadequately...

...Such talk may be the norm among our more rancid movie agents, but though this film was made in Hollywood and about Hollywood, I cannot believe every character was meant to be an agent...

...Miss Didion, by the way, is said to have a good ear for dialogue: the samples given above are representative...

...When Fellini hauled his monster in on the beach during the closing moments of La Dolce Vita, Mastroianni had merely to gaze in its direction for the audience to learn and in a single stroke be convinced of his identity with it...

...A `cult' director with a nose for commerce...

...The whole business is "timely" in a most revolting way—quotation marks are called for, as with nearly every aspect of such films—but the worst of it comes afterward, with Maria flashing abortion every time she sees wastebaskets (there are not a few...

...In Winter Light two people do their level worst to destroy each other during the course of a ten-minute talk, and when it is all over and they have survived, the film opens into what has to be among the strangest moments in narrative art, an indeterminacy so total and baffling that we understand Bergman can now take the story wherever he likes...

...Chloe is trying to charm the hero into infidelity...

...Still, the truth is that Rohmer's stories have not demanded anything beyond the means he uses, since every turn of a plot revolves around those small motions of grace in the eyes, the mouth, the voice of a character which might as well be seen occurring indoors...

...Tuesday Weld is beside him, puzzled by this strange man who is her competitor in neurosis...

...But this is not ordinarily the case...

...They have got the technique without getting the point, and their camera wanders indeed, wanders brave and free, from the time one remark ends till the time another starts up—when, calmly, like a great careful beast of prey, it settles upon the face of the next actor in sequence...

...What else is there to do but watch and marvel...

...Thus is the viewer employed as a tabulator on some sturdy and reliable piece of machinery...

...But with the gradual caving in of any substance in his tempted hero, Rohmer has made the same boring soul the subject of Chloe...

...AT THIS JUNCTURE I depart from Miss Didion and Mr...

...At the risk of appearing silly, I beg leave to inform the men and women responsible for this machine that sometimes a shrimp is just a shrimp...

...His diapason is made of chords neither higher nor deeper than the soft ironic...

...Antonioni and his mentor, the novelist Pavese, artists who worried about putting the "gabble" of everyday life into their work, discovered ways of letting dialogue slide by as airily as 220 its utterance required...

...My own modest illustrations show a new medium being used at its liveliest to animate a new sense of reality: we see the literary palimpsest only to realize how much we have gained...

...Very often, what we get in serious-minded films is the skeleton of a novel, or a fictional mood, or a whole literary tradition barely and a little embarrassingly fleshed out with pictures...

...Like Bergman's pastor and his lover, these two have placed themselves beyond love and hate...

...He will give us the Monica Vitti character, say, in Red Desert, making a parable of her isolation as she tells her son a bedtime story...

...yet the subject cannot be endlessly appealing to a movie audience, and the directors of these films have been considerate enough to step beyond it...

...But I spoke earlier of the tactlessness of this slick horror, and I should like to dwell on the point briefly...

...Chloe in the present film is a cosmopolitan vagrant who springs out of our hero's past at a time when he is settling into married life...

...An honest symbol is itself directly sensible as a concrete image, like those gnarled tree roots in Nausea which remind the narrator of a world that solidly and threateningly exists beyond his own consciousness...

...Well, never mind...