On Screen

...They share an intense, passion-filled summer despite haunting thoughts of his wife and children...

...In the film, nothing is done with this olfactory ending that makes the once mysterious mother into a mere woman like the lowly prostitute...

...But it omits a large part of the sado-pederastic doings and of the deep metaphysical unrest that together rived the hero, Torless??thus the film is like a piano missing both the bass and treble parts of its keyboard, unfit for serious music...

...The other German entry...

...he is also quite unaware of the small, personal touches that create authenticity...

...Made by Bo Widerberg, whose Raven's End showed promise, this is a tragic idyll of the Scandinavian belle epoque...

...The film version of this story of a gifted boy's coming to terms with life concentrates on the plot outline of sadistic goings-on at an Austrian military school circa 1900...

...The acting, too, is commendable, although Thommy Berggren's noble lieutenant seems to have been infected with the plebeian mannerisms of the Actors Studio...

...Its amateur actors, sixthly, are impeccable, though this is something that we have, wrongly, come to take for granted in Italian neo-realism, of which this is a cogent offshoot...

...Not only does it break off just as things might become interesting (perhaps further installments were contemplated), it also fails to probe behind the surface of what it does tell, and so makes no social, historical, or artistic contribution...

...whereas the aging whore...

...the heroine is militantly unattractive...

...From the carriage taking him away forever from the odious school, Torless looks out at Bozena's window...

...In an impossible situation, the French paratroops conduct their mandatory brutality not without some regret, some immanent sympathy for their victims...

...The writer-director has a sense of humor (not tumor) and he tells his story with neat back-and-forward flashes...

...The film, apparently based on strictly documentary evidence, tells of the always intrepid, sometimes ugly, and finally tragic struggle of the fln to liberate Algeria...

...Whatever solution is found is not the ultimate one: Hidden beneath it is another layer of reality or truth, and that may not be the last bottom, either...

...The dialogue is racy, full of Serbian four-letter words only sparingly rendered in the subtitles...

...There is metaphysical truth beyond metaphysical truth just as there is psychic reality within psychic reality...

...Lazic, furthermore, is a pushover for fashionable cliches, such as sneaking in a sequence from a Hitchcock film (The Birds, of all things), or having the camera pan endlessly in circles a la Chabrol...

...The mathematics teacher, an ordinary young man, is turned into a Peter Lorreish grotesque...

...Almost all of the leaders were exterminated or imprisoned, and only several years later did a new organization and renewed uprisings accomplish the liberation...

...Jean Martin, who plays the para-troop colonel...

...Krzysztof T. Komeda contributes his usual catchy score (he may prove the true heir of Nino Rota), and the title song, Vie de toujours, drawn from the main theme, is a worthy successor to the one from A Man and a Woman...

...were represented with two works...

...But, for the most part, it is routine Godardian slickness...

...There is no more nudity on display than the briefest glimpse of the beginnings (the French call it naissance) of one breast, yet it conveys everything...

...While occasioning a thorough upheaval in the viewer, it succeeds in concealing not only its art, but even its craft...

...What is substituted is simplistic broadening...

...No mother would use his last name in addressing her son??could this have been the film-maker's clumsy attempt at suggesting a coming-of-age...

...The polish director, Jerzy Sko-limowski, was responsible for (or, more accurately, guilty of) two films...

...Kluge's twin sister, Alexandra, stars, and her face has a kind of precocious know-it-allness that some may find fetching...

...Even the fact that it was made as a spectacular for French television does not quite justify its singular vapidity and pointlessness...

...Pontecorvo's film is remarkable in many ways...

...If that is all Rossellini, the quondam radical, had in mind, he might as well not have discommoded himself with a transalpine journey...

...Five years ago, Pontecorvo gave us a routine piece of concentration-camp melodrama, Kapo, from which no one could have begun to expect a development into the dark splendors of The Battle of Algiers...

...The other entry, Elvira Madigan, is substantially worthier...

...The only possible explanation for this film I can excogitate is an apology for the benevolently paternalistic despot, whether his name be Louis XIV or Charles de Gaulle...

...Only Katharina Renn, as Anne of Austria, was a face familiar to me, but not much dearer for that...

...Fourthly, it never becomes slick or overproduced as other pseudo-documentaries, such as The Four Days of Naples, have tended to be...

...Bariera, made in Poland, is a pretentious, turgid allegory with a mildly provocative opening sequence and ponderous obscurity thereafter...

...Bozena, becomes that young charmer, Barbara Steele...

...The others, however, are fine, notably little Nina Widerberg...

...Not only does she act with disarming unaffected-ness, she seems even to have learned to walk a tightrope authoritatively...

...When the pseudo-philosophical Beineberg tells Torless that pitying Basini is "Ver-schwendung der Lebenskraft"??the squandering of vital energy??the subtitles reduce this to a mere "waste...

...Torless gives an evasive answer, followed by the novel's closing sentence: "And, testing, he inhaled the subtle odor rising from his mother's waist...

...The Festival directors, two years ago, provided us with another Skolimowski diptych of choice loathsomeness...

...thus, for example...

...Le Depart, which Skolimowski made in Belgium, is barely better...

...Jean-Marie Patte seems miscast as Louis...

...But they do succeed in extirpating what little flavor there is in the dialogue...

...And some credit must go to the director, too, for the excellence of the one professional actor in the film...

...It affects me as a history lesson from a lackadaisical high school teacher who gets steamed up only about a few quaint customs, some bizarre etiquette??which he assumes will tickle the uninvolved palates of his pupils??and for the rest is content to rattle off political and historical facts with unseemly haste...

...The editing, seventhly, is exceedingly canny, always conveying the impact and meaning of a scene, but stopping short of vulgarly journalistic details...

...Basini, the victim, is tall but slender in the novel, "with slack, indolent movements and effeminate features...

...a prodigal evening into which the lovers walk is all white and ultramarine...

...But there is Jorgen Persson's almost extravagantly beautiful color photography in which things take on deeper, more daring colors than in life...

...Another Yugoslav film, Dusan Makavejev's An Affair of the Heart is a much more sophisticated affair: A tragicomic love story salted with lively social comment and peppered with cunning devices to produce Brechtian Verfremdung, it is daring as well in a use of total nudity that would be advanced even for a Western country...

...Upward, heavenward, there is no single roof: The box is also double- or multiple-topped...

...And there is Widerberg's direction, lively without becoming frantic, lyrical without wallowing in its lyricism...

...Dragoslav Lazic's film is an unhappy concert of trite scenario, undistinguished acting, amateurish photography, and unimaginative direction...

...Ne seri...

...As that one and only danced-out summer drags its feet into winter, we can feel the temperature of the film's colors dropping, colors that have the Nordic expressionist wildness of Edvard Munch...

...For just one specific example of this much-lauded film's insensitivity, consider the ending...

...emerges as "Don't blubber...

...As it stands, it is a much more satisfying version of Le Bonheur, which it resembles even down to its Mozart score...

...Although trying to be a little less chaotic, the film retains the spastic quality of the story and much of its carefully fostered formlessness and aimlessness...

...and, as the hero, Jean-Pierre Leaud proves conclusively that he has long since exhausted his slender acting resources...

...The Swedes, too...

...which translates "John...

...The vulgarization of a major work of modern literature becomes complete...

...The subtitles also contribute the only bit of (inadvertent) fun in the film, when they keep translating "tumor" as "humor"— viz., "If he had a humor, it would be swollen...

...The acting and direction are routine, and the subtitles, as is their wont, finish off the film...

...He glances sidelong at his mother, who asks, in the book, "What is it, my child...

...It is an infinitely rich and complex performance: soldier, showman, thinker, epigrammatist, enlightened martinet, histrion, egotist, human being, this colonel — whatever percentage of him is fact and whatever Franco Solinas' screenplay??is a character the very best theater can envy...

...Though it may have lacked the excitement of a cocktail-party primeur, Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers turned out to be an artistic and political experience that eats its way into the toughest consciousness...

...One thinks one is watching at the very least a spectacular news-reel, if not indeed history itself in the making...

...That is, if so thin a festival can have a thick...

...Whether because he thinks this joyfully sensuous or because such pleasures are hard to come by in Yugoslavia, I cannot say...

...As Elvira, 1 7-year-old Pia Dcgermark is sheer felicity...

...Rossellini's direction is literal-minded and devoid of emotional or intellectual intensity, and the acting is at best what one might expect from accomplished television hacks...

...Worse yet, his mother addresses the boy as "Torless...

...It was Bozena who had once shocked him by suggesting that she and his mother were sisters under the skin...

...With her somewhat obstinate, craggy profile she combines tenderly dissolving full-face loveliness, so that from the side she harks back to the Eddas, from the front to Hans Christian Andersen...

...Lastly, the crowd scenes have been staged and shot with a verisimilitude that had spectators in other countries (before a headnote to the contrary was appended) convinced they were seeing documentary footage...

...he would have been much better as the protagonist of The Blob...

...These are a mite better here, though they still lose the satirical edge: When someone says, "I live like our delegation in a foreign country," they give us, "I live like an ambassador," which misses the political irony...

...a Copenhagen blue velvet bow fairly darts out of Elvira's cascading blondness that periodically overflows the screen...

...It is hard to conceive what Rossel-lini thought he was doing with The Rise of Louis XIV...

...even so, the intelligent script and sensitive direction manage to convey well defined and differentiated personalities and the varied nature of their involvement...

...now they have helped history to repeat itself...

...Lazic and his cohorts have no idea how to achieve a smooth, or even purposively choppy, continuity...

...The two German films do little to dispel our image of Germany as a filmic desert...

...As an aristocrat and deserter, he cannot, it seems, stoop to menial labor abroad...

...Don't give me that shit...

...No doubt in today's Poland social criticism is permitted to go about only if heavily veiled, but if under seven times seven veils Salome is a pig, was this dance necessary...

...In the film, he is a heavy-set bumpkin with a large, pathetic cube for a head...

...Fifthly, it maintains a forthrightness and slight graininess in the photography as in newsreels, but without overdoing it...

...Thirdly, the film is admirable in its balance of cataclysmic violence with conciliatory exhilaration and soft-spoken thoughtfulness...

...The facility with which he and his fellow scenarist Andrzej Kostenko could adapt themselves to New Wave cliches is downright indecent...

...The plot is hackneyed and unconvincing, and though Wid-erberg's dialogue strains for freshness, it shows mostly strain...

...There are, nevertheless, a few amusingly cynical moments in this chronicle of a petty thief and part-time prostitute, and an episode at a school for police dogs is howl-ingly funny...

...Jonas Cornell's Puss & Kram (Hugs & Kisses) is an epigonous piece of cutie-pie New Wave tomfoolery distinguished only by the fact that Cornell shows off his wife's pubic hair in it (no doubt the eponymous "Puss"), and that it begins with a long monologue that remains untranslated...

...He does, however, dwell at length and in extreme, cloddish close-ups on people washing or wolfing down their food...

...Not the least engaging feature of this film is its subdued but unquenchable sensuality, which can forgo spilling over into explicit sexuality...

...the film lurches, sputters, creaks and stumbles ahead??or, more often, sideways...

...As I wrote in my Afterword to the Signet Classics edition of the book, its purpose is "to show that the world is, at the very least, a double-bottomed box...

...It is based on the story "Anita G." in Lebens-laufe, which seems to have been written by an absent-minded computer that reads antinovels on the sly...

...at the end of it, they commit suicide...

...A grey sea is a vast expanse of pitiless steel...

...Immediately after The Battle of Algiers, particularly meaningful for the United States today, came The Feverish Years, a piece of cinematography inept enough to have been produced in Outer Mongolia, not the artistically fairly awakened Yugoslavia...

...A young aristocratic officer runs off with a beautiful circus tightrope-walker...

...If only Widerberg's scenario and dialogue could have eschewed triteness, this might have been a film to remember for many a summer...

...Georges Leclerc's cinematography is competent enough, but it is hard to believe that he used the same Eastman-color which, in Elvira Madigan, yields such gorgeously painterly results...

...Unlike last year, four-fifths of the Fifth Festival proved an exercise in fine futility, having produced only one incontestably superior film— which could already be seen the following day in a regular movie house...

...The subtitles, albeit the largest I have ever seen, do not manage, regrettably, to blot out more than a third of the image...

...Yesterday Girl, by the avant-garde novelist Alexander Kluge, is as involved and desiccated as his fiction...

...And that is not all...

...Secondly, the rebel leaders are shown almost exclusively as fighters or strategists, without any luxuriating in the pathos of their private lives...

...The initial subtitle given is for the exclamation "John...

...Nevertheless, this banal tale of a young hairdresser who wants to be an auto racer and will stop at no reasonable crime to achieve his goal, has a few witty or dashing moments...

...Volker Schlondorff's Young Torless, is an earnest but pedestrian transcription of Robert Musil's brilliant first novel...

...The cast is amiable, and Eva Ras wears her almost non-stop nudity stylishly...

...all bespectacled gravity and yet a child...

...First, in that, though heartily on the side of the rebels, it manages to make the French seem human, their leaders almost sympathetic, their techniques of torture iniquitous and repellent, yet, given the circumstances, not incomprehensible...