Gravity Defied

...One must love young sages and old madmen...

...even in a pas de deux, while the ballerina is doing her variation, the mere expression on her cavalier's face, his delight and pride in her, is an integral part of the total effect...

...There exist six, apparently insuperable, difficulties...

...Alain Jessua, the young Frenchman who wrote and directed it, is a man of genuine talent, and not like Bernardo Bertolucci (over whose inept and pretentious Before the Revolution Pauline Kael was recently swooning in the pages of Life), a mere alert dung-beetle, making a film out of the droppings of half a dozen masters and petits-maitres of cinema...

...A note on Richard Lester, a young American ex-television director now making movies in England...

...If there is little hope for ballet on film, there seems to be even less for integrity in a minor key...

...But Hofmannsthal was vatically right: A film like Life Upside Down is for "people of our time:' even if it does not suit the masses, who, at all times, are of no distinctive time at all, La Vie a l'envers, which should be translated as "Life Inside Out," or "Life in Reverse,' is an ingenious and highly conscientious examination of alienation from one's milieu that leads to withdrawal, and withdrawal that ends as insanity...

...This film is dedicated to demonstrating that neither the old fashion of simply condemning the madman, nor the new fashion of elaborately emulating him is to be unquestioningly countenanced...

...Sight and sound are put to resourceful uses that are, however, never mere trumpery-always penetration and illumination...

...The new Beatles picture, Help!, proves, after a few flashes of life, a deadly bore...

...still another is the wife's measuring of her bosom to find out whether it is the ideal one as prescribed by a magazine article (the subtitles, by translating 20 ems, as 20 inches, also translate the Venus de Milo into the Hottentot Venus) ; the fourth is a sequence in which an emotionally stymied couple listen in their bedroom to an aphrodisiac recording of sexual laughter, while from the outside, into the middle of recorded giggles and pained, living silence, falls the chirp of a quizzical cricket...

...The present-it prevents me from going mad...

...above all, there are those pertinaciously cropped shots in which parts of two bodies become synecdoches for the greater or lesser transports of love...

...First, motion: A static camera setup is lifeless, yet the moment the camera begins to move it creates a choreography of its own, competing and conflicting with that of the ballet...

...another is the wife's partial overhearing of intimate confidence exchanged between two young girls...

...Gagman...

...Sample profundities: "If there is no present, it's not alive, it doesn't exist...

...Jean-Luc Godard's The Married Woman contains a good deal of undeniable visual imaginativeness, a measure of somewhat more deniable honesty, and an incontestable surfeit of banality and intellectual confusion...

...the problem of young madmen remains unresolved...

...Godard has told us what to do with young sages and old madmen...

...at least, not utter, uninhibited believing...

...In showing us how an apparently ordinary, middle-class young housing-agency clerk removes himself from reality, quirk by quirk, Jessua accomplishes on his first try what the much-touted Bresson never quite brought off: the stripping of the story to its barest essentials of people, words, sets, and situations...

...Devices often misfire, as does a sequence of hectic shuttling between positive and negative exposure...

...Gags require a semblance of a plot or a point of view to hang them on...

...Even here, though, Godard's injudiciousness tends to get the better of him, and he ruins his best effects by excessive dawdling or repetition...

...subconsciously aware, however, of the trickery of cinema, he cannot silence the still, small voice that whispers, "Fake...

...Fifth, emotion: There is emotional play and byplay among dancers in certain ballets, missed by the camera while focusing on one or the other individual...

...on the screen, dimensions and spatial relations lose their dramatic perspicuity...

...For one of its four offerings, it picked Ashton's insipid La Valse (further worsened by contrast with Balanchine's), it often chops off dancers' heads or feet, its color photography is undistinguished and its sound recording of an already slack orchestra appalling, and Drigos music for Le Corsaire is so offensive as to make this old warhorse fitter for the knacker's than for the choreographer's art...

...Third, space: In watching live ballet, the spectator has a clear sense of how high a leap is, how long a jete, how prodigious the distance covered by the most graceful cabriole...

...were it not for a bizarrely comic streak in the writing...

...These "fragments," as Godard himself calls them, concern a winsome but mildly imbecile young woman oscillating between a husband and a lover...

...The hero of the film becomes absorbed in things a lamp, a table leg-which for a poet like Rilke leads to truth, for a psychologist like Fromm to sanity, and for this fellow to dementia...

...there are tenderly intimate close-ups of lovers washing their hands together or struggling with the hooks of a brassiere, actions that take on the dignity of ritual...

...a bed that a slatternly wife has converted into a cross between a beauty parlor and a cafeteria becomes pristinely virginal and wifeless...

...the camera (in Raoul Coutard's capable hands) is made to perform every sort of gyration and salto mortale, including turning over on its side, sometimes with psychologically meaningful effect...

...All technology was enlisted in the service of the gag, and a kind of nuclear gagmanship exploded...

...Worse yet are the endless monologues in closeup, during which an actor expatiates in unending platitudes and trivialities about some large abstract topic like "Memory" or "The Present," and registers little beyond the embarrassment at having to deliver such drivel at close quarters-or, if it is improvised, as in some cases it seems to be, at having to be caught with his metaphysical pants down...

...Or if you think that film is for "those who make up the masses" (true enough in 1921), you naturally stay away unless every reviewer happens to be raving about a movie, and then you end up with something like 816, and feel perfectly justified in reimmersing yourself in abstention...

...anarchy is piquant only with relation to an order...

...Though the good, average people and their social institutions are not spared a goodly number of well-merited kicks, and though the arguments of madness are presented with the greatest possible sympathy, it is still made to look mad and, in some ways, cruel...

...In the debate between not quite untenable insanity and not exactly prepossessing normality, there are no comfortable syllogisms or fulgurating epigrams with which to clinch the argument...

...in the handling of the camera and in the montage, above all, Ionesco and Minsky were joined in unholy matrimony in the eye of Godard...

...There are, however, some compensatory visual devices, and Godard is able to handle these dazzlingly...

...or when a sign reading "DANGER" is closed in on by the camera till it reads "ANGE," and another, announcing "PASSAGE," is split, ominously, into its components, "PAS"-"SAGE...

...But Fonteyn is one of the ballet's great artists, and Nureyev one of its greatest technicians...

...While we have the feeling of perusing a scientifically complete yet concise case history, the wistful humor of the dialogue, the poignancy of visual details, and the rhythm of the editing give this case history the pregnancy of art...

...Things are relative: one man's truth is another man's therapy and still another's poison...

...a common catalpa thrusts itself into the world with such gnarled, hyperexcrescent bossiness that it turns into a sacred fig-tree claiming a new Buddha...

...The heroine (engagingly played by Macha Meril) is a cute little narcissist who does not know the meaning of the word "equilateral" and thinks that Auschwitz was the scene of thalidomide trials, who indulges her most ludicrous whims while continually testing her husband and lover with portentous but pointless questionings...

...And this short film is crammed to the gills with citations from or references to Moliere, Bossuet, Fantomas, Dullin, Jouvet, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Cocteau, Rossellini, Pierre Emanuel, Apollinaire, Truffaut, Berenice, Celine, Hitchcock, Night and Fog, Scarlett O'Hara, and a few others I missed...

...Seeing at one remove is not believing...

...What Apollinaire has called the poesie des affiches is finally reduced here to obstreperous pop art, and the sweetness of erotic dalliance is dragged out into compulsive doodling...

...All the same, there are four impressive scenes...

...Second, composition: A ballet, like a painting, largely depends on the way in which bodies and movements are composed within the frame of the stage-on the relationships of soloists to one another or to the ensemble, even of bodies to scenery-and these groupings and proportions are lost sight of in anything but long shots...

...Jessua is an original, in that his film reminds one of nobody, though a faint thematic parallel may be traced to Louis Malle's excellent The Fire Within (Le Feu tollet)-itself, needless to add, a failure in these parts...

...or her husband, a well-intentioned but troubled commercial pilot...

...Life faces life, and the jampacked, darkened hall with its images flitting by is to me-I cannot put it otherwise -almost worthy of reverence, for it is the place to which souls throng in an obscure urge for survival, escaping from the numeral into vision...

...The performances attain a degree of veracity that would be terrifying...

...The intelligentsia, however, in the year 1965 is still-believe it or not-unconvinced that movies are of consequence...

...One is an uneasy meeting between husband and guilt-ridden wife at an airport...

...A busy subway is swept clean of its multitudes...

...It is cause for rejoicing when honesty and imagination announce themselves so forcefully in the work of a young film-maker...

...Posters, headlines, record jackets are cut into the action to comment with wry cogency...

...And to Alain Jessua goes the honor of having created a film that is amusing or disturbing depending on whether it is viewed from the outside or the inside, but perceptive and artistic whichever way one turns it...

...for what actor, after all, is a philosopher...

...a mistress's cheerfully ejaculated banalities shrink to a distant, ridiculously raspy, chirruping...

...Von der Ziffer zur Vision -it sounds fine enough, but if, instead of merely dealing with ciphers, you are a cipher, there is no escaping...

...There are also some absurd puns, promulgated as serious insights, as when the girl gravely asks, "Qu'est-ce que ca veut dire, 'regarder...

...Life upside down, witty as well as wise, offers the warning that cannot be voiced often enough in a world in which easy solutions, whether in art or morality, are becoming more and more fashionable- and I am using "fashionable" advisedly: As never before, good or bad art, good or bad mores have become questions not of taste or belief, but only of fashion...

...It could hardly matter less even to her, never mind us...

...Fourth, selection: The ballet-goer at a live performance picks out the details that interest him most, that seem to him to epitomize the moment- the arch of a foot on pointes, the interaction of a dozen dancers in an abstract pattern, a psychological reaction suddenly manifested in the ballerina's port de bras...

...What one sees is often very beautiful-human limbs and bodies entering into an infinite variety of erotic juxtapositions that partake of a stately dance as well as of a yearning colloquy...

...Why is ballet always so unsatisfactory on the screen...

...But by the time Lester turned to gagging up Ann Jellicoe's charming play, The Knack, the effects were more obtrusive, less .spontaneous...

...but what one hears is sheer tripe-either arrogantly dragged-in quotations and allusions or stupid maundering and pseudo-metaphysicizing to make the most hardened sophomore blush with the shame of recognition...

...Sixth, psychology: A moviegoer may know consciously that he is watching an actual dance whose wonders are honestly arrived at...

...the imagination more driven and less controlled...

...The film is remarkable, too, for its objectivity...

...His first film, A Hard Day's Night, blessed with four future Commanders of the British Empire and a clever scenario by Alun Owen, introduced a lively and endearing transportation of burlesque and absurdist jokes onto film...

...And so Lester becomes the John Bunyan of film, producing in sequence Grace Abounding, Pilgrim's Regress, and The Life and Death of Mr...

...Jacques Robin's photography is particularly good at revealing the shoddiness of an ambiance...

...Nonetheless, we are supposed to care greatly about whom this frivolous goose will choose to be stuffed by: her lover, a fatuous, self-absorbed actor...

...Time and again these columns have sounded like eulogies for the untimely dead or dying: heroic little films desperately needing an audience from among the intelligentsia, because the average moviegoer could do nothing with them...

...a pinball-machine parlor, emptied of people, reverberates with the bounce of self-propelled balls...

...on screen, the camera forces its choices on us and they are not always what we want-in any case, the human eye can, to some extent, concentrate on a particular and still see the whole, whereas with the camera it's either or...

...these two alone, even if it were not for the fine work of other soloists and members of the corps, could excuse the inexcusable...

...in the final reckoning, the ordinary world of doctors, police officials, simple-minded friends and benighted wives emerges as fumblingly well-meaning and pitifully likable...

...Back in 1921, Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote: "The atmosphere of the movie house seems to me the only atmosphere in which people of our time-those who make up the masses-enter into a direct, wholly untrammeled relationship to an enormous, albeit curiously contrived, spiritual inheritance...

...Nicole Marco's editing is full of surprising rubatos that, after the shock is over, leave us with the sense of their rightness...

...and is solemnly told, "C'est garder deux fois...