Young and Coolish
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Young and Coolish MODERN MOVIE SCREENS no longer have the black border the screens of yesteryear were equipped with, but for the film fare of the past season, as I...
...The Girl-Getters is a modest, skillful, charming, inconsequential, and fairly dishonest little picture, to be enjoyed and deprecated in roughly equal measure...
...But Tinker is neither comic nor romantic...
...It deals with a bunch of youths in a typical English summer resort - in other words, a perfect bit of hell on earth and water - who have organized a syndicate that preys on middle- and lower-class girls seeking to sandwich in a little romance between sea and sunshine...
...The resultant explosion - more of a sexplosion or implosion - will produce such a fallout of fatuity that survival will be, not impossible, just undesirable...
...At one point they file past the little parttime whore who sits, forlorn, on a parapet, and during that very moment we catch her - yawning...
...he is cynical and mechanistic, and he would, once the door was shut, simply resume his daily routine...
...and, in being transferred to 35 mm., lost much of its photographic definition...
...Thus he has conceived a clever mode of transition: A sequence ends in a stop-shot, the camera then moves laterally across to another, unrelated still, permitting us to see parts of both, side by side, until it reaches the second completely and continues with normal filmic forward motion...
...ON SCREEN By John Simon Young and Coolish MODERN MOVIE SCREENS no longer have the black border the screens of yesteryear were equipped with, but for the film fare of the past season, as I look back upon it, a black border seems mandatory...
...Most of the films we have been seeing - avant-garde, rear guard, off-guard - jointly spell disregard for minimal requirements of a civilized adult...
...Michael Winner, whose debut this is, should turn into a noteworthy director...
...From Montreal comes Claude Jutra's A tout prendre (meaning "after all" or "all things considered" and not Take It All, as officially Englished), a vastly self-indulgent and derivative film that, nevertheless, manages to have moments of sardonic éclat and enough quizzical effrontery in between to keep it from wholly dissolving in undisciplined copycattiness...
...There are several other nice episodes: one in which the hero tells his mother (astutely played by Tania Fedor) that he is about to marry a Negress...
...Tout un chagrin...
...the syndicate would in reality be for moneymaking along with the lovemaking, all the more so since most of the boys seem to have no other visible source of income...
...There are two extremely funny scenes: one in which the hero recites poetry as he plummets off a jetty, and another in which he takes out a bank loan for an abortion...
...Winner has a strong feeling for detail: not always imaginative or even accurate, but always intense and sometimes incisive...
...And the beach bacchanal that follows, at which the human-sized effigies of bride and groom are burned in a frenzy that goes far beyond Guy Fawkes Day toward the autosda-fé of Torquemada, the fun erupting into hate is harrowingly realized...
...showing their contemptuous attitudes toward the tourists - complete with a special derogatory slang...
...But, unfortunately, it is precisely in his love that Jutra becomes tenuous, vacuous, a nonentity...
...more should have been made, in particular, of the contrast between the morte saison and the brief, flashy, desperate doings of summer...
...and setting all this bustling activity against a background of general shabby exploitation and suggestions of the deadening doldrums at both ends of the short season...
...and the hectic dialogue and still more hectic cutting of the film also have their moments...
...The English version by Leonard Cohen is adroit, though it tends to outbid the original in literary conceits: thus "Une larme...
...With his customary aplomb in plumbing the obvious, Karl Jaspers remarked, "It is in our love that we are what we actually are...
...The boys, one feels, would have no difficulty making out with the girls each on his own...
...As for Jutra's borrowings, they are not only excessive in quantity but also insufficient in taste: Even something like Godard's camera's awful, endless shuttling between two faces with a lighted lamp between (from Contempt) awaits us in this magpie's nest...
...At times these details misfire, as when Tinker, having just seduced a sweet, silly, overweight blonde who thinks she has found true love, shoves her out of his flat and falls against the inside of his door in that mingled weariness and relief with which countless comic or romantic heroes have applied their backsides to sutdio-built doors...
...And that is the paradox that emerges from A tout prendre and films like it: that where the disaffected young - charming creatures that they areare most real, they are least real...
...There is also a mock-heroic off-screen narration that can be quite amusing (except when it tries to be genuinely heroic and poetic: "What I'd like to do is to challenge death, dirty it, defile it...
...becomes "A drop...
...Tinker and Nicola are a prosified juvenile version of Benedick and Beatrice, though their hipsterish oneupmanship and counteroneupmanship is not without interest, especially in the interplay of social and sexual elements...
...At other times, however, details are powerful...
...Not content with mere undigested autobiography, the movie revels in in-jokes about the Montreal film scene, which is carrying esotericism to new peaks...
...Again, at the wedding of one of the gang, considered by most of them as a betrayal of their unprincipled principles, every gesture of false gaiety, every mumble of pseudo-jovial hostility is captured in masterly fashion...
...Where the film is good is in depicting some of the techniques of the syndicate...
...he will, in due time, learn also that a device must be integrated into the whole to earn its keep...
...his humiliation at the hands of Nicola's posh Oxonian friends...
...But even here the film is facile in the way it allows the kids to revert speedily to romantic young lovers, and in a contrivedly ambiguous bittersweet ending, convincing neither in its actual bitterness nor in its potential sweetness...
...illustrating some interesting interactions among members of the gang...
...The main trouble is that the story is too much Jutra's own, and the technique too much everybody else's...
...What, then, is good about A tout prendre...
...In a manner that is 2 per cent Antonioni, 2 per cent Cocteau, 26 per cent Truffaut, 69 per cent Godard, and 1 per cent of uncertain provenance (though closer scrutiny would find a source for that, too), we are served up the tale of a squalid love affair between a young filmmaker and a Negro actress-model in what seems to be every trivial and sordid detail (leaving out only the essential motivation, of which Jutra is either unaware or afraid) and which is, worse yet, enacted by its real-life protagonist, Jutra, and Johanne, his actual ex-girl friend...
...I say that the film is good in these things but must add that it could also be a lot better...
...The main plot concerns the adventure of Tinker, leader of the gang and street photographer who uses his job to obtain the victims' addresses, with Nicola, spoiled rich girl and professional model who, for not wholly plausible reasons, spends part of her summer at the resort...
...One has the impression that every patch of the cinematic image, every movement that contributes to the action, has been thought about, moulded, worked over with the total form, mood, and impact in mind...
...As a used-up piano that played all summer long is about to be ceremonially drowned in the sea - a farewell offering to the departed season - we watch the boys cavorting as farcical pallbearers to the deceased instrument...
...It becomes progressively clearer that should the world end, it will be neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with a collision in outer space of those mighty unmanned missiles, Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown...
...That yawn is just right: it is perfectly unassuming, yet it deflates pathos and merriment both at once...
...his exploitation by a mean, sanctimonious employer - have an all too familiar ring to them, yet manage to introduce an occasional sharp, novel-sounding tone cluster into lovelessness's old sour song...
...Indeed, some of their wintertime girl friends turn to prostitution during the summer - though this, too, is glossed over...
...No, a fall...
...On the other hand, Winner has elicited telling performances from a large and motley cast, and has got himself two highly personable principals in Oliver Reed - who might, to good effect, imitate Brando less - and Jane Merrow - whose figure and demeanor were not exactly those of a fashion model but all the more desirable for it...
...Moreover, whereas Johanne and a few others are able actors, Jutra himself is lumpish and boring...
...And as one's filmic disaffection increases, one may, perhaps, be excessively susceptible to the shenanigans of disaffected youth, as seen in a brace of films just in from England and French Canada...
...But this flamboyant trick is not properly motivated, and, after a while, it is dropped as conspicuously as it was introduced...
...Lastly, the film was shot in 16 mm...
...Though Peter Draper's dialogue intermittently rouses itself to a good, crackling bit of impudence, and the acting is lively and authentic, it is the director, Michael Winner, who most deserves our attention...
...Many of the incidental episodes - Tinker's casual affair with the neglected, unhappy wife of a vaudevillian...
...Sheer disaffection does not provide a sufficient thread to string anything on: pearls, or even swinishness...
...and one in which the hero's buddy and neighbor climbs, as usual, across a ledge into his friend's place - only this time he has just left a mistress in his bed and finds an ex-mistress in that of his pal...
...Again, as Tinker's and Nicola's affair progresses, the walls of Tinker's digs, previously lined with a casual medley of photographs, blossom out with ever more numerous, ever larger portraits of Nicola, until the parting scene is played against a veritable seraglio of larger-than-life-size but two-dimensional Nicolas - fine, except that Tinker would have had neither the time nor the money for such darkroom orgies...
...and his film, accordingly, lacks center...
Vol. 49 • May 1966 • No. 11
