Images: Imaginative and otherwise
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN Images: Imaginative and Otherwise By John Simon The New Wave is wavering. Having, with a few notable exceptions, waived sense for the sake of scintillation, and pushed this to the...
...Sundays and Cyb??le is the story of an amnesiac war pilot, Pierre, whose memory is frozen by the guilt of having strafed to death a young Oriental girl...
...Here is a camera almost always on the go, but whose rhythms are as manifold and controlled as those of a ballet...
...The problem is that a stage masterpiece can be put on the screen only if the author or some scenarist of genius recreates it in cinematic terms...
...There are spine-tingling little discords, as when the dialogue ever so slightly lags behind or lurches ahead of the images, or when an aerial shot of walking figures is coupled with their words and footsteps heard from nearby-to suggest the soaring importance of these diminutive but contented creatures...
...This is stifling in its own right and quickly pre-empts the sense of confinement and frustration that should belong to the lives of the unhappy foursome...
...But the world malevolently refuses to understand...
...The story has many weaknesses...
...The performances, too, are fine and finely dovetailed: Besides that of Mlle...
...Having, with a few notable exceptions, waived sense for the sake of scintillation, and pushed this to the limits of available technical resources, it seems now to have nowhere to go but up into narrative and (I write the word with trepidation) human significance...
...With Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey Into Night we are buffeted to the other end of the spectrum...
...Clearly such transitions are not based on mere formal and verbal echoes, but provide ideological commentary...
...The motivation of the characters is often left rather cavalierly nebulous...
...The hero is a human being, flanked by other human beings, about whom we can actually care...
...What Brigitte Fossey did for a tiny girl in Forbidden Games, Mile...
...For it is obviously easier to achieve filmic bravura when literary and moral values are negligible...
...the preachment has a way of becoming too insistent...
...Now, Bourguignon's camera is a brush: sometimes that of a painter, sometimes that of a Chinese calligrapher tracing ideograms, whose loveliness is in the combination of shape, meaning and the grace of movement that begets them...
...Nicole Courcel's uneasy nurse, the best piece of work this fetching actress has done to date...
...Still, the film is one of the best seen hereabouts in some time, boasting in Bourguignon a director of superior achievement and superlative promise, and in Patricia Gozzi an adolescent actress whose performance will stand as a touchstone...
...This is not redundancy: In Sundays and Cyb??le the hero is neither the "significant" echolalia of a Marguerite Duras, nor the "significant" obsession with objects of an Alain Robbe-Grillet, nor the dromomaniac cameras and megalomaniac montages of several young directors...
...Not that the writing in Sundays and Cyb??le is particularly good, or the technical brilliance wholly unself-conscious...
...If the words, ideas or humanity of a film came fully to the fore, the technical effects would become, if not ancillary, at least challenged in their supremacy, which to any trueblue New Waver they must not be...
...a shot of a real horse disappearing is followed by that of a wooden horse on a carrousel-and, ironically, the toy horse becomes part of the world of infantile adults, while the real horse is part of the sylvan paradise in which a child, charging ahead of years, envelops the man she loves...
...But there are excesses, too, as when Pierre is suddenly viewed through the tiny peephole in a metal blind blatantly rolled down over a ticket window: This should create a natural iris effect, but because no one remains there watching Pierre, the device becomes more artificial than any conventional technique...
...Pierre's cure is dubious-either too pat, or, perhaps, no cure at all...
...The chief interest of the film lies in its earnest striving to reconcile the new demonstrative technical expertise with esthetic and ethical considerations, an amalgam which hitherto only Fran?§ois Truffaut could carry off, and even he only intermittently...
...When, at the very end, Lumet permits himself some fancy, though old-fashioned, camera movements, his endlessly receding camera, besides making the Tyrone family look like David Susskind's guests at the close of Open End, merely draws attention to unresolved incompatibilities between two art forms...
...For the film never clarifies for us the relationship of Pierre and Cyb??le, and leaves us with the uncomfortable feeling that the ultimate dissolution by arbitrary death is there to take the place of resolution by artistic insight...
...It is not that Lumet has done anything capriciously wrong-although a shot of Long Island Sound with anachronistic motorboats and yachts is disturbing, and a scene in which two men make drawing-room conversation while working on a car in the garage (Lumet's attempt to extend his range) without once referring to the work at hand is absurd...
...Bourguignon deserves further credit for getting incomparable photographic effects from Henri Deca?©, who has worked admirably for directors as different as Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Ren?© Cl?©ment, but who here achieves masterpieces...
...Here are transitions of the most seamless sort: Cyb??le's brag that she will become a doctor and cure Pierre leads into a nurse's tray and Madeleine hatching the scheme which will turn into everyone's undoing...
...Next, a bright rear-view mirror races along a roadway and picks up Pierre's excited face as he hurries toward the orphanage in innocently horizontal motion...
...Sundays and Cyb??le must be viewed in two ways: as a film, uneven but highly meritorious, and as a first film, auguring an extraordinary future for its gifted maker and juvenile star...
...From Maurice Jarre, Bourguignon has elicited a model musical score, infinitely various (Albinoni, Handel, Charpentier, Tibetan gongs, and Jarre's own edgy modernism) yet spare and unassuming...
...as if to compensate for the marvelous greys of the photography, people are rather too black and white...
...It is also a near-triumph of the intelligentlyand I stress the intelligently-mobile camera...
...Here, out of monumental but pedestrian veneration, we have characters and camera pacing restlessly around a small enclosure like so many caged panthers, or, in the case of Ralph Richardson, polar bears...
...There are even some hints of adventitious parallels with Christian and Greek mythology, but these can be mercifully ignored...
...and a handsome bit by Daniel Ivernel, hitherto known for his villains or weaklings, as a strong and kindly friend...
...He becomes dimly but strongly drawn to Cyb??le, a gamine of not quite 12, abandoned by her family at an orphanage, who responds to him first with the desperate eagerness of a lonely child, then with all the passion of a precociously feminine little girl...
...Here a very great play has been not translated to the screen but reverently put behind glass-it matters little whether the plate glass around the stuffed fauna of museums or the glass of lenses encasing live theater in inanimate images...
...desolate nocturnal cityscapes, enchanted woods of Ville d'Avray, a solitary gull skimming the waters of a pond while the small girl's voice pours out its great yearning, a romantic horseman taking almost forever to vanish down the corridors of trees, a minuscule pavilion emerging in the landscape so very far away that it hardly has the right to be there-yet it is here that the final disaster will take place...
...Alexandre Astrae coined the phrase "cam?©ra-stylo" which most New Wave directors subscribed to, only to turn their cameras not into fountain pens but hypodermic syringes full of heroin...
...There are also superb long shots which often connect two distant but veiledly related people or places within the same frame...
...Again, an elevator rises toward the acrophobic hero's face and blots it out-the contraption is black and reminiscent of the airplane in which the malady befell him...
...What cannot be ignored is the ingeniousness and beauty of Bourguignon's cinematography...
...This does not mean that Serge Bourguignon's first feature film disregards modernistically daring, often even ostentatious, technical devices, but it does mean that it generally subordinates them to concern with non-cardboard people in a noncelluloid world...
...If we go from nuns' and their pupils' hands folded in compulsory prayer to similarly but voluntarily folded hands of a sculptor joyfully modeling his clay, there is more in these meeting images than meets the formalist eye...
...The acting is adequatein the case of Jason Robards, excellent-and Andre Previn's music trashy...
...He is now living in Ville D'Avray, a suburb of Paris, with an attractive nurse who helped him back to partial sanity and who cares for him rather more possessively than therapeutically...
...even Madeleine, the nurse, is shaken in her faith in the purity of the relationship and sets in motion the final, futile tragedy...
...But neither peripheral pluses nor minuses can much affect the respectful leadenness at the center...
...The nurse, finding out about it, is racked with jealousy, but comes to see that Pierre's affection is predominantly that of a now childlike being seeking commensurate companionship, and partly that of the involuntary child-killer obscurely trying to expiate a repressed sin...
...Hence the preference for various forms of alitt?©rature and amorality and inferior scenarios...
...Gozzi does for a little woman here...
...Gozzi, so lovely that it almost hurts even in its happiest moments, there is Hardy Kruger's Pierre, a little too Brandoesque at times but cogently balanced between naivete and neurosis...
...We are transported now into the world of Corot, now into that of Monet or Seurat...
Vol. 45 • December 1962 • No. 25
