Technique Triumphant

...After all, other countries have been thus occupied, and we know what happened in them...

...But the characters-what of them...

...To put it another way, it is as if she were profoundly aware that every gesture, expression, sound is to be situated in its exact place on a carefully calibrated scale between the greatest joy and the ultimate anguish: between the act of love and the act of dying...

...Time and again in A Man and a Woman I had the feeling that it was the camera that wanted to zoom in or out on a particular scene, to pan panegyrically with a car cavorting along a beach, to be fed monochrome instead of color film by way of a balanced diet-and though the cinematographic affects are often exhilarating and almost always exquisite, I felt that by indulging his camera (even to the point of arbitrarily switching from color to monochrome blue or ochre sequences) Lelouch has spoiled his film...

...and so, too, the body: velvety womanliness is stopped short unexpectedly by the sexless grace of child or angel...

...It is beautiful to watch, and more than beautiful, ennobling...

...and one or two other moments in which the monstrous assumes the mask of mere drab routine...

...Always understated, tawny or hazy, they force the eye to make fine distinctions, to hear, as it were, the quarter tones of the color scale...

...They remain ordinary and largely subliminal...

...A pair of forlorn, very white woman's hands disconsolately dropped into a lap swathed in a black fascist skirt...

...It is all part of an immense tact, of a total femininity both physical and metaphysical, and it must, in the last analysis, stem from the unconscious...

...It rained a lot while he was shooting, Lelouch explains...

...The chief characters of the film are not people but automobiles...

...This, to me, is a much more effective way of dramatizing man's inhumanity than Lionel Rogosin's protracted, repetitious, heavy-handed irony in Good Times, Wonderful Times, in which documentary footage of war's horrors is contrasted with idle and reactionary cocktail-party chatter...

...The colors are, in their nature, juxtaposition, and consecution, quietly spellbinding...

...But where, I ask, is the plot...

...The hero is a racing driver, and when he is not racing, he is driving about in his car, either with the heroine or in pursuit of her...

...yet her voice has the slightly strangulated modesty of a virgin bride's "I do...

...Whether it is trees racing past a setting sun as seen from a speeding car, or a motley boat gliding past intricate wooden balusters of a grayish green, or a silverybluish shimmer of sea framed by the silhouetted, unfocused heads of kissing lovers (between touching lips and chests a lozenge of frizzled silver), or even just a reddish fur collar whose windblown hairs ripple along the heroine's face, movement is wedded to color...

...Brownlow, evidently, has a genius for making one tank and twenty men look like a whole German army of occupation, and there are many directorial touches that, in their occasional raw effectiveness and general somewhat slapdash, hit-or-miss quality, remind me of the young Stanley Kubrick's Fear and Desire...

...If the hero embraces the heroine on a beach, he whirls around with her and the camera whirls with both of them, and next, in a visual echo, a dog is gamboling about describing unleased parabolas in the sand...

...There are those little touches that augur well...

...What is clear from all this is that to the young director technology is far more interesting than man-who matters mainly insofar as he provides data with which the cameracomputer's hunger can be stilled...

...One of the troubles with Rogosin's film, as with A Man and a Woman, is the reliance on improvisation and cinéma-verit...

...For some sequences, Lelouch strapped himself and his camera to a car, and, it would seem, never got quite untied...

...Going to see it is a little like a donation to charity, but, in this case, the donor may turn out to be the beneficiary...

...And even there, kinetics carries the day...

...Color, far from striking gorgeous but static poses, continually unfolds before us: the camera has become a kaleidoscope, and the whole world but the colored particles in it...

...A man's hand and a woman's almost meet on a child's black fur collar, but shy away from contact...

...There is a lunch scene in the latter film, in which Miss Aimée and leanLouis Trintignant, out of sheer enforced spontaneity, end up acquiring the same unnaturalness, whether real or merely apparent, that people in cinéma-verité, paradoxically, are almost never without...

...Everything is done in the car, from shaving to planning one's amatory strategy...

...There is not anywhere on today's screens a more intense yet mellow, a more striking but at the same time soothing presence than hers...

...The sooner we realize that improvisation is useful only in very small doses-and then, usually, with children, psychotics, or geniuses-the sooner, in other words, we fathom that dialogue, to be a work of art, must preponderantly be written, the better...

...Besides, at a crucial moment when characters and speech have a chance of coming alive, Lelouch cuts the dialogue in and out of a silly song on the soundtrack...

...A Man and a Woman is really about a man and a machine, and by that kind of love story I find it rather hard to be moved...

...Effective in a way, but scarcely illuminating...

...a partisan ambush in which half of a German officer's face is volcanically blown off...

...A nebulous husband of the heroine and shadowy wife of the hero are evoked only to be preposterously killed off...

...And so her every response is precise-in duration as well as placement-and bears just the right amount of love or death in it...

...Her face, voice, movements dip freely into these colors, allowing them to overlap almost imperceptibly, suffusing each with the other, or drawing undauntable lines of demarcation between them and immersing her entire being in the one pure color or the other...

...and in an age when writers can hardly write, what can we expect from actors...

...The angular, elongated face has an architecture full of surprises: a sudden softness where one's eye pursued chiseled acuities...

...And what is even more amazing is that she makes us cognizant not only of the locus of an utterance or movement on that scale, but also, simultaneously, of the invisible presence of the two extreme points, the finiteness and infinitude of our existence...

...To show what would have happened if England had been occupied by Nazi Germany is a good, though not extraordinary, idea...

...And the dialogue...

...The non-motorized sequences seem scarcely more than interludes for all their fleeting charm...

...And on top of all that she can act...

...the heroine's figure floats, like a dream vision, in front of the cityscape of Paris-only much later do we realize that she was sitting in front of the window of a bus...

...Strained through Anouk Aimée's being, the ordinary becomes aristocratic...

...It is as if Anouk Aimée had reduced the palette of emotional responses to two colors: a boundless, world-conquering smile, and a deep, delicate anxiety...

...Actually, this film is considerably better, despite thematic disjointedness, uneven performances, and sketchy characterization...

...But, of course, this gift goes far beyond technique...

...And a good thing, too, in this case, for Claude Lelouch's film is aggressively ordinary...

...Nowhere...

...Except, to be sure, in its colors...

...the rest is merely a routine romance blossoming on the front seat of a Ford Mustang shuttling between Deauville and Paris, as two hearts beat in tune to the ever-busy windshieldwiper turned metronome...

...Since we can see the machine only as man interprets it, and man only as the clever mechanics of the finished film reflect him, we must conclude that we are faced with an elaborate symbiosis in which one cannot tell the players even with a program...

...This makes A Man and a Woman the most beautiful color spectacle since Antonioni's Red Desert, and less recherché in its effects...

...Visual details are handled with imagination...

...Her movements have learned the art of amorously caressing the air they cleave...

...We have by now become quite used to director's cinema, both in its bad, or Godardian, aspect, and in its (usually) good, or Truffautian manifestation...

...Only the consummation is relegated to a bed, the locale being France, not the U.S...

...A much more human film is It Happened Here-human, that is, not merely in detail, but in its general orientation and concern...

...it is nothing that a director could inculcate or another actress imitate...

...Is this an adolescent, a girl, a woman...

...Generally improvised by the actors...

...But what Lelouch offers us is cameraman's cinema, in which the director is his own director of cinematography and does not so much write with his camera as allow the camera to write for him...

...There is something of the scimitar about her sinuous sharpness, yet everything in her speaks of a gentleness that only long nights of loving could have instructed in groping its way to the core of human darkness...

...Does that mean that the machine is getting more alive and man less so...

...a jovial indoctrination speech by an English gauleiter, full of the most blatant racism expressed in sweetly reasonable tones, more in sorrow than in anger...

...For a grain of artistic truth, we can forgive even the grainy photography and wavering sound with which part of It Happened Here is afflicted...

...Cross-cutting is handled inventively: camels seem to be watching the hero's car race through France, until it is revealed, gradually, that they are appearing in a film on which the heroine is working, and that we are merely witnessing the parallel lives of hero and heroine in apparent fusion...

...Where, however, does this leave the plot...

...But the attempt to dent the British stiff upper lip in a serious, not-beyond-the-fringe way is a worthy undertaking, particularly when it had to be done by two young men, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, on no money whatever, with amateurs giving freely of their time, and the whole dogged operation spread over several years...