Loving Exploration

...The performances range from Joan Hackett's amiable but exaggerated Dottie, through Jessica Walter's merely exaggerated Libby, to Kathleen Widdoes' hermetically lifeless Helena...

...Sex is handled with integrity and artistry in this film...

...When Larry Hagman, who plays Harald lumpishly, fumbles his elementary Latin and declaims, "Morituri te salutemus," the lapse is prototypical: One cannot ever tell who is blustering ineptly-the character, the novelist, or the script-writer...

...or the crossing of the sky above the lovers, now by brashly ejaculatory jet planes, now by yearningly honking wild geese...

...As a Sunday outing begins, space opens up in all directionseven inward, into the hearts of a young mother, her delicious little daughter, and her tenderly avid would-be lover-to be gradually stuffed to bursting with human and animal activity at the Copenhagen Zoo...

...Anna silently debating with herself whether to reprehend or respond to the nocturnal mating call of pebbles at her window pane...

...The lovers have their last coffee together under the tree on which their bathing suits are hung up to dry: The man's trunks are immobile, while the woman's suit, exposed to the wind, is flapping frantically, prefiguring her imminent flight...

...listening analytically to the sounds of Anna preparing herself in the bathroom...

...The child becomes the happy mediator between man's wariness and the naturalness of the beasts: A fateful gap is bridged as an elephant's trunk swoops down on a proffered carrot, and the successful imitation of a penguin takes on the vast dimensions of joy...

...freezing his private parts as he rummages, naked, in Anna's refrigerator...

...The composition, for instance, of three diagonals parallelly crossing the image from upper left to lower right-Anna's thigh, John's head and chest, Anna's face-is memorably beautiful...

...Here is a film that does not remind us of Strindberg or Bergman or Sucksdorff or Sj?¶berg-no offense meant to any of them, except that it is nice to come upon something unexpected...

...But Lindgren's direction is not only alert to time and space, it is capable also of dominating them...

...But in Lindgren's tactful handling, these premonitions and remembrances take on the quality of refrains or incremental repetition in a ballad, and what could be simpler than the story of a ballad...

...and the male figures-thanks, no doubt, to the author herself-are mere caricatures of good, bad, or silly guys...

...The Group has nowhere to go, but if of a rainy evening you should have the same problem, you just might want to go there together...

...Or the whole thing may be no more than a lovely pictorial composition: the woman's white garments still resisting the dark to which the man's face has already succumbed while only his fierce golden hair rides like a comet through the night...

...Take the walk of the couple to the promontory, with the music gently arpeggiated, while the moon and its reflection in the sea spell out that inverted exclamation mark we cherish in the paintings of Edward Munch, and the camera dollies in the opposite direction from the ambling couple until, in an extreme long shot, the figures dissolve into the darkening seascape...

...And not a word or picture too many...

...so, too, is a female hand traveling up a male arm, the slow progress emblematic of all loving exploration...

...Sidney Lumet's direction is pleasantly bouncy, except for his panning around the Group once or twice too often...

...But it is also universal and, when told with respect for human idiosyncrasies, affectionate attention to detail, words and images that eschew banality, it emerges as something spirited, tasty, and engagingly alive...

...Or perhaps the idyll is simply too weary a craft to dodge the shoals of our skepticism...

...Still, Dear John is a film to feel along with in a state of blissful consanguinity...

...When, for example, in the quiescence between bouts of lovemaking, John casually hints at marriage, Anna protests, "You mustn't say that-you're not in me now...

...Or is the dialogue ultimately a little too thin...

...the friendly skirmish, during an embrace, of offensive male and defensive female hands on the battleground of a woman's bodythe number of such intimately reverberating insights is legion...

...In the hands of a master three of these categories can be redeemed, but masters are few and have a way of slipping into self-parody, and, in any case, the new always augurs well when it is not merely a gimmick...

...Psychological observation is minute and exact: John running through a repertoire of critical faces as he scans his waistline in a mirror...

...Not much need be said about The Group...

...The excitement of the discovery of erotic reciprocity is friskily conveyed...

...Mary McCarthy's novel was unreadable...

...Perhaps this is symbolic: The man may be discovering, to his surprise, that life can hold more than escape into seafaring, and he may look away from the woman in his amazement at her having come to mean so much to him so quickly...

...Rune Ericson photographs it sensuously, and the director stays with it, sunk into a rich, drowsy wordlessness...

...The film abounds in filmic values...

...There is a great meeting here of tangled superficialties, which Boris Kaufman's well-defined color photography only underlines...

...When Anna asks the aroused John to dance, his ithyphallic embarrassment is implied by a look and a mere "I can't...

...Equally effective is a comic montage of extreme close-ups of John brushing his teeth and a sailor's brush swabbing the deck...

...Thus he is not afraid of lingering for long, slow seconds over a sitting man's head looking out to sea from a promontory at nightfall, and, next to it, a woman's betrousered hips and thighs, erect and immobile...

...Sidney Buchman's script is workmanlike...

...Take, for example, its sensitivity to the time of day: time made tangible through changes of light and dark, fluctuations of the rhythm of life, modulations of moods...

...This is Resnais' Marienbad (or, if you prefer, Hiroshima) Strategy of breaking up the time sequence by suddenly introducing previously unshown episodes from the past, or repeating previously shown ones, identically or somewhat altered, to suggest the characters' thoughts, recollections, or the modernity of one's cinematic technique...

...Here morning explodes on the scene, with the hero performing ecstatic cabrioles on the way to a matutinal swim, the heroine visibly filling herself up with the fuel of freshly distilled sunlight, and her brother pronouncing with an authority the most confirmed noon riser could not question that "breakfast is the best meal of the day...

...social and sexual problems, though not wholly evaded, have no more urgency than five-finger exercises...

...Sex and domesticity are propitiously blended...

...the movie version is readable enough...

...No," John laughs, "just cleaning some beer glasses...

...It doesn't matter," she smiles and clings to him, assenting...

...So here the story of how Anna, an unwed mother full of passion hemmed in by the proud choosiness her position demands, and John, captain and owner of a small merchant vessel and a man whose marriage was anything but smooth sailing, find a way toward each other -tentatively, gropingly, exuberantly, falteringly and, at last, radiantly -is commonplace enough...

...As evidence of the film's wavering courage, "yid," "commie" and "lesbo" are blurted out with uneasy bravado, while the famous pessary is euphemized into a mere "whatnot...

...Is it that the context of these lovers remains a bit too sketchy...

...Though it is omnipresent either implicitly or overtly, it is always relevant to the furthering of the plot and the unfurling of character, as well as subtly and elegantly depicted...

...One is reminded of Godard's The Married Woman, except for the much greater air of spontaneity here...

...As John, the mercurial Jarl Kulle is all generous volatility: his expression leaps into swaggering boyishness or hurtles into depths of manly feeling...

...In Dear John, the intense simplicity of the story, verging on triviality, does not seem to require-and perhaps cannot even sustain-the weight of such complexities...

...In Dear John, which Lars Magnus Lindgren adapted and directed from Olle L?¤nsberg's novel, there is something that might, at first, smack of a gimmick...

...his movements and inflections reveal, facet by facet, a manysided simplicity...

...The dialogue is equally lightsome...

...Swedish films have tended to be readily classifiable as paeans to the brief Nordic summer tremulous with pantheistic nature worship, studies in suicidal neurosis exacerbated by a lowering ambience, ponderous preachments creeping through a forest of symbols, or creaky frameworks for the display of programmatically wholesome nudity...

...What is it that nevertheless prevents the film from attaining full artistic stature...

...In Christina Schollin's Anna, the tartly mettlesome peasant, the anxious, unfulfilled girlwoman, and the smilingly serene young mother merge into absolute believability...

...And the dialogue is commensurately intelligent...

...When John is busy with the kitchen sink, Anna inquires from bed, "Are you washing him in cold water...

...fiddling, embarrassed and indignant, with a box of chocolates for the girl who seems to have rejected him...

...to which John replies with touching plainness, "You mustn't say that...

...And the director is always unobtrusively there, driving the characterizations home...

...Might it be that the spaciousness of a novel becomes too cramped in the narrower compass of a film...

...Yet the characters refuse to come alive...

...in turn, those gibbous haunches may represent the woman's longdormant physical desire awakening to incontrovertible intensity...

...For the splendid parts fail to build a whole greater than their sum...

...Many are the scenes informed by inventiveness and delicacy of perception...