On Screen

...The music throughout is eclectic to the point of ecumenicity: When it isn't Johann Strauss, it's Richard, and Beethoven and Khachaturian also get their licks in...

...Anyway, the Slab has been discovered on the Moon...

...Sometimes the dialogue is sophomoric wisecracks...

...The section begins with a Dr...

...some simpleminded gag is acted out in praise of North Vietnam and in execration of the U.S...

...Oh, I forgot to tell you: We saw the Slab precede him thither...

...when millions are at stake, we don't gamble on an art form Americans do not understand...

...So in Belle de Jour there is almost perfect decorum: Whips leave no marks, shouts and squeals are minimal, nudity is almost subliminal, and perversions are intimated but left in the twilight of ambiguity...

...The acting is uneven...

...She walks into the University Guest House and shoots her victim (off-camera...

...Michel Piccoli, as the odious friend, and Francoise Fabian, as a whore reluctantly playing the part of the domina, are very good...

...Looking like a Mies van der Rohe version of one half of the Tables of the Law, this Penta-logue has no writing on it, but can emit a mystagogic buzz...

...Francisco Rabal and Pierre Clementi, as a pair of punks, are appallingly bad...

...Floyd stopping off at a space Hilton (trade names are often, and no doubt remuneratively, made use of) on a secret mission to the Moon...

...the whole construction is a model for student directors to leam from...

...Instead, he is forced to make more or less respeotable films, which he nudges as best he can toward pornography, and which, as a result, tend to fall between two stools (no pun intended...

...Amore regrettable failure, though not a total one, is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey...

...and Kirilov, a suicidal painter...

...The cell votes to assassinate a visiting Soviet dignitary (as second-best to blowing up the Sorbonne, Louvre, or Comedie Frangaise...

...If only the rest of the film were up to her—but there I go dreaming like a frustrated bourgeoise...

...Et voild...

...This last is, one assumes, a hideous irony...

...I won't go into the details of this astral agon, but let me say that one astronaut finally makes it to Jupiter, or the fourth dimension, or whatever it is that is represented by 15 minutes (at any rate, it feels like a mauvais quart d'heure) of fancy yet not quite fancy enough trick photography...

...and Russia, implied to be in cahoots (which should give you an idea of the film's political seriousness...

...Unfortunately, her favorite client, a grisly young punk, tracks her to her luxurious home, and, out of jealous frustration, shoots the surgeon...

...Some very odd things then happen in the Beverly Hills-Louis XVI apartment the astronaut ends up in: He discovers himself there, old, older, and, as the Slab appears, dying and being reborn as a kind of Buck Rogersy Superbaby, a new and presumably better species...

...The film jerks ahead plotlessly, atomistically, amorphously...

...Whenever possible, the narration or dialogue clashes with the inscriptions or titles...

...The loving spouse ends in a wheelchair, bereft of speech and paralyzed...

...After he is thoroughly dead, one of the victors hits him once more viciously, which is a nice human touch, and sets the stage for the next stage of history...

...Here the point is to show the astronauts as completely efficient machines in mind and body, and Hal as a solicitous, omniscient den mother, patronizing, quite pompous, and, as it turns out, eager to assert his superiority...

...fill every shelf with copies of the Chairman's little red book...

...The truly disconcerting film of the day is Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour, the story of a rich, beautiful, frigid, masochistic housewife, unhappily revered by her surgeon husband...

...They set up house in the apartment of a friend's parents who are away for the summer...

...casually saunters back and kills the right one (off-camera...

...They repaint the place in Maoist colors...

...The grand master of the avant garde has given us another masterpiece, hailed all the way from the Times and the New Yorker to Newsweek and Life...

...Apparently, though, one is allowed to be truly satirical in Hollywood only on a low-budget film such as Dr...

...At the Hilton there is some dull verbal fencing with quasi-friendly Russians, and Dr...

...The Slab, of course, is never explained, leaving 2007, for all its lively visual and mechanical spectacle, a kind of space-Spartacus and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story...

...Strangelove...

...But then everything Godard says and does testifies to his estrangement from all save the swinging young...

...Instead, she has a good dream, of the two of them healthy and happy together...

...To be sure, the Hakim Brothers, those revolting producers who get good men to make bad pictures for them, precensored the film, and (one learns from Sight and Sound) a juicy thing or two, especially in the Duke episode, was never even released...

...Floyd has a dull (Bell) telephone conversation with his daughter on Earth...

...Your enjoyment of La Chinoise will depend entirely upon how partial you are to organized schizophrenia...

...These men in ape costumes are so convincing and terrifying that by comparison the ones in Planet of the Apes (a set of costumes—and film—I quite enjoyed) are pussycats...

...walks back to the getaway car and realizes she got the wrong room number and guy (on-oamera...

...Henri, some sort of economic logician...

...Godard?also quite deservedly...

...They remain, regrettably, purely personal obsessions...

...Then she and her driver calmly take off...

...When Godard can't have intertitles, he has his pseudoaction—a bunch of kids forming a Maoist cell and playing a game they call Marx-ism-Leninism—surrounded by slogans and inscriptions of all kinds on posters, blackboards, or directly on the walls...

...I gather the dream fantasies as well as the two brief flashbacks to the heroine's childhood are Bunuel's, as is that elusive ending...

...It is all utterly juvenile...

...What happens to the others is not clear, although there are a few random and indecipherable scenes showing Guillaume (whose last name is Meister, a grandiose allusion to Goethe's hero) doing some peculiar, histrionic things...

...Guillaume, her boy friend, a Brechtian actor...

...Veronique has a lengthy debate on the suburban train with Francis Jeanson (the radical writer, editor and philosophy teacher) who sensibly urges her not to resort to terrorism, but she persists on her course...

...Nevertheless, and almost sadly, the presence of a master is felt in the film...

...They behave perfectly brutishly to some friendly tapirs, and fight over territorial rights with a neighboring bunch of apes as if they had read their Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz, which they probably have...

...Catherine Deneuve is lucky in having a lead that requires little more than beauty and abstractedness...

...Images, words and music are used psychedelically: to create a splash of pictures, sounds, ideas—things happening not so fast that you cannot by and large keep up with them, yet fast enough to affect you by their mere multiplicity, diversity and speed rather than their meaning...

...So the satire throughout is tepid and halfhearted, and tends to look like quite unintentional stupidity...

...In the quasi-interview monologues, the pace slows down...

...So the next and main section of the film shows us an expedition to that planet in an interplanetary spacecraft, a hydrocephalic electronic caterpillar the length of an average street...

...Her anxieties and evil dreams have left her...

...perversity coupled with anti-Catholicism is as dear to Bunuel as to Sade...

...Worse yet, Godard is, as much as any point of view can be deduced, in sympathy with Veronique and the whole ugly nonsense...

...There are mainly three kinds of scenes: 1. Long, mock-cinema-verite monologues, in which Godard's faintly audible voice asks questions, and the answers are either improvised or, more likely, piped by Godard into earphones hidden under the actors' hair...

...During these, the camera plays its little games, like back-and-forth tracking shots, and the soundtrack has its fun fading one thing in and out while something else drones on under or over it...

...but what registers in these close-ups is only twitching faces, manual mannerisms, curious speech patterns—either because of the direction, or because what is said is such prattle that serious listening is impossible...

...This brings her closer to her unsuspecting husband...

...Veronique goes back to school (so the narration tells us) aware that her double killing was only the first small step of a long march...

...The color cinematography by Sacha Vierny (of Marienbad fame) is subtly voluptuous, the set design and decoration unostentatiously sumptuous, and Yves St.-Laurent's wardrobe generates more lustful yearning, among female viewers at least, than any of the film's sex...

...Things go badly with them until the Slab appears, whereupon one of them thinks of using a bone as an offensive weapon and, behold, they slay the leader of their rival apes...

...finally she finds her way into an exclusive little bordello...

...The color photography by Raoul Coutard is much more beautiful than this film deserves...

...Divine, which appears in the form of a large black stone slab that mysteriously materializes whenever mankind is about to launch on a stage of higher development...

...He may or may not be on the road to recovery when a sinister family friend tells him the whole truth...

...Here, under the tutelage of a madam who combines the best features of maternal-ism, lesbianism and sadism, she undergoes (always only from 2-5 p.m...

...The one brilliant performance is that of Genevieve Page as the madam: Every oeillade, every innuendo is made to count, and nothing ever rises above the level of pregnant understatement...

...Toward the end of the film, something resembling a plot gets under way...

...This long film, five years and $10 million in the making, is fascinating when it concentrates on apes or machines (though there is too much of this, too) and dreadful when dealing with the in-between: human beings...

...This is Bunuel's tragedy: He could make the greatest works of film pornography ever—nothing to be sneezed at—but no one will subsidize him...

...It carries several astronauts in sarcophaguses in a state of hibernation, two others who conduot the craft, and a supercomputer oalled Hal 9000, of the famous 9000 series that can do everything except go wrong...

...In other words, men have become computerized and computers humanized, with bad consequences for both...

...There is not one extraneous shot, nor one that is missing...

...A triumphant ape hurls a bone into the air...

...When he gets to Moon Station Clavius, he conducts a dull briefing session about why quarantine has been imposed on Clavius...

...2. Skits about the Vietnam War, using toy planes, guns, tanks...

...And the film is full of Bunuel's private symbols (on top of such public ones as shoe fetishism): visual or aural references to cats, children skipping rope, asphodel seeds, cowbells...

...what it does deserve is most of the acting, especially that of the supremely untalented Anne Wiazem-sky, who is the new Mme...

...Absolute dreadful-ness, however, is reserved for the metaphysical, the (gasp...

...We realize now that the dullness, as well as the commonplaces and evasions, must be satire...

...The result is rather as if one of those heinous tv commercials, where the mythical superiority of a product over all its identioal competitors is simultaneously written and shouted at you (so that mere blindness or deafness should be no excuse for not buying it), suddenly went schizophrenic and assaulted your unbelieving eyes and ears with berserkly divergent messages...

...The Slab appears first to a bunch of prehistoric apes...

...Bunuel or Kessel, it is all trashy because superficial: None of the characters, least of all Severine, is as real and moving as, for example, the Uncle in Viridiana...

...Moreover, the screenplay by Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere (the collaborator on the even more unfortunate Diary of a Chambermaid) tries hard to be clever and profound, but succeeds mostly in being coy and portentous...

...That such puerile, pretentious, wholly formless slop should be taken seriously by anyone but Godard and a few particularly square hippies would make one wonder about the world—if the world weren't long since past wondering about...

...Kubrick and his co-scenarist, Arthur C. Clarke, must be trying to ridicule the naivete, disingenuousness, and benighted bureaucracy of creatures who handle all that mighty heavenly hardware...

...Yvonne, his girl friend, a peasant who came to Paris to do housework but ended up doing street work...

...The rhythm of the writing, the color changes, acting tempos, camera angles, the whole editing—all this is perfect...

...She has dreams in which she is humiliated, tortured, raped, killed...

...There is much suggesting of weird but un-clarified nastinesses which, in fact, makes the film rather more smutty and unpleasant...

...A directorial cleverness, such as an unexpected high-angle shot, calls no attention to itself...

...a good many humiliations for real...

...There are five kids in the film: Veronique, a teenage philosophy student...

...and spend their time reading out loud from the Chairman's sayings, or lecturing one another on their comic-strip versions of Marxism-Leninism...

...more often, sophomoric profundities...

...Now that her husband seems utterly pulverized, our completely self-abased heroine can, blissfully and as his equal, share rock bottom with him...

...The summer is now over...

...So, too, is a daydream in which an aging, crazed duke performs on Belle de Jour (as the heroine is called from 2-5...

...by a clever matching shot, it becomes a space ship circling (somewhat interminably, but 20 minutes are about to be cut from the film) a space station to the tune of The Blue Danube...

...Kirilov is unhappy that Veronique, not he, drew the lot to kill ("If Marxism-Lenin-ism exists, everything is permitted," he says, further persiflaging Dostoev-sky from whom his name is arrogantly drawn), and commits suicide...

...3. Brief sequences showing members of the group haranguing one another, arguing politics, pacing about the apartment while declaiming out of Mao, writing catchwords on blackboards, or (more rarely) washing dishes, sleeping, doing a Maoist rock 'n' roll number or morning exercises to a chanted Mao aphorism...

...Henri protests and is forthwith ostracized as a revisionist...

...Unfortunately, neither of them is an interesting enough species to keep us interested in their ensuing struggle for supremacy and survival...

...Disparate elements are embraced in a self-possessed, lucidly enchanting flow...

...To give the operation prestige, we are continually bombarded with quotations from and allusions to political, literary and cinematic notables, and the references (again on the principle of those tv commercials) are immediately illustrated with still shots of the person mentioned...

...the others are mostly adequate...

...It is emitting signals ad astra, to be specific, toward Jupiter...

...How much of this nonsense (and even though some of it makes clinical sense, it is nonsence) is Bunuel and how much the novel it is based on, I can't say: Not for anything in the world would I read another book by Joseph Kessel of the French Academy...

...This scene is the epitome of film as masturbatory fantasy with every shred of reality banished...

...Actually, there's no presumably about it: After the ones we have spent the film's two and three-quarter hours with, any species would be an improvement...

...from 5-2 she is Severine) a mock ceremony involving incest, necrophilia, onanism and sacrilege...

...We get some mildly amusing scenes involving space stewardesses (they can walk upside down, as in an Ing-mar Bergman film), space food (it's all liquid and only the picture on the container tells you what you're imbibing), and space toilets (where were you when it hit weightlessness...