On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Social Mobility Up and Down j^fcOETS ought to be stran-gled," wrote the disgruntled Lady Bulwer-Lytton from Italy, "for all the lies they have told of this country." Marco...
...he lives in a luxury that ill accords with his puniness...
...I dare say the subtitulist must know the difference between Pistoia and pistoia, and between the two meanings of "assembly," but cannot trust the audience...
...The subtitles are, as usual, inadequate both in quantity and quality...
...After the binge, there is the prolonged sobering-up at Charlie's sumptuous London house...
...Charlie Bubbles ends with the hero seeing a balloon (the Jules Verne, not the kiddy kind) outside his wife's window one morning, getting into it, and taking off...
...But Bellocchio always remains within the pale of the artistically possible: He practices foreshortening rather than total dislocation...
...Both land in jail...
...nor the irrepressible satire of Germi, Risi, Salce...
...Carlo is the bookkeeper of the local Socialist party...
...One desperate scheme to thwart Elena via her younger brother has failed...
...In the subtitles, the Council of Pistoia becomes, by way of fractured Italian, "The Assembly of Guns...
...He closes the door and rushes away, and we discover that the commode is contained in a bizarre masterpiece of baroque cabinetwork...
...Then there is Elena, Vittorio's energetic and emancipated sister, who not only looks after this aristocratic family's fortunes, but also finds time for a voracious sex life that excludes marriage —no one is going to get her money...
...The Italy he conjures up is no tourist attraction—at best it is a rather sinister circus...
...He may well become the worthy successor of the late, and sorely missed, Gianni di Venanzo...
...As in his first film, / pugni in tasca (not yet released here), Bellocchio starts with his aggressively in medias res approach...
...No character in this pithy, impudent, cynical little film is sympathetic or sympathetically viewed...
...the silly young priest rejoices, unaware of the ruthlessly selfish motives that have brought Carlo back to the shabby neighborhood he grew up in...
...is followed by a Chemistry for Ladies (would that it could keep them from becoming pregnant...
...and this, in turn, by a Concilio di Pistoia in 10 volumes...
...Miss Minnelli is so untalented and homely, and so blithely unaware of it all, that her performance must rate high on the list of any collector of unconscious camp...
...Above all, the film shows no true understanding of the successful writer's life...
...Still, this sort of thing won't do, except perhaps in verse translations by Ezra Pound...
...rendered palely in the subtitles as "You saved me...
...Nonetheless, there are two or three good sequences, and the film is further abetted by authenticity of acting and ambience...
...On the other hand, the film has an apt performance by Billie White-law as Lottie, and a smashing one by Colin Blakely as Charlie's literary drinking partner...
...This is the story of a pretty young London proletarian, married to one burglar and in love with another...
...Whereas Godard's sublime indifference to logic intermittently succeeds in producing a dadaist nightmare...
...And Charlie says of her, "Lottie doesn't get up much before Sunday on a Saturday...
...While she waits for her lover's long sentence to be over, to keep her appetites satisfied and to provide for her baby whom she loves, she sinks lower and lower on the socio-sexual scale...
...At one point Vittorio and Elena attend a perfectly dreadful performance of Verdi's Macbeth, and they are, indeed, themselves in the clutches of a small-time latter-day Macbeth and Lady Macbeth...
...though everyone is given the benefit of tolerant, amused understanding, and is made, in accord with Nietzsche's famous motto, human, all too human...
...The others are equally adept at their work, and Daniela Surina communicates with particular authority how Giovanna's feelings freeze into deadpan ambitiousness...
...From this irony, we cut to the doctor's staircase and office door to see Carlo forcing his and the priest's way in...
...Two imports from England concern the plight of the lower classes when they indulge in upward mobility (Charlie Bubbles), or sink lower yet into criminality (Poor Cow...
...The supreme deadweight in the picture is Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland's daughter, whose screen debut proves easily the most inauspicious since Turhan Bey's...
...The first part of the film is an extended binge on which Charlie, a North Country lad turned London literary lion, goes with a pal of similar description—only this one not quite so big a hit and, apparently as a result, not quite so corroded with the dry rot of success...
...we know that we are in bad hands...
...but the film, unlike the book, stops short of having her turn into a streetwalker...
...Actions, however gross or destructive, have no visible consequences...
...Miss Tattoli's face, ageless and commanding, projects an eternity of tedium and contempt...
...there are no chemicals at all in that muck you're eating...
...about her home-baked bread, just praised by Charlie, she remarks, "All the ingredients are very pure...
...the result is a split personality that seems to benefit neither half, and least of all the film...
...All this is punctuated with shots of Elena spread out upon the table like a stormy evening against the sky: She has been truly delivered—into - Carlo's hands...
...But what is finally defeating is the sense of unearned disenchantment that hovers over several of the characters, a kind of offensive defensiveness that is either a hopeless stereotype or else requires closer and fresher examination than is accorded here...
...Marco Bellocchio, the 28-year-old film-maker, whose second film is China Is Near, may be a poet in his handling of the camera, but he certainly tells no rhapsodic travel-poster lies...
...We are plunged into several typical episodes from the lives of the principal characters without the faintest notion of who or what they are, or how they are related to one another...
...is acutely observed, as well as abrasively directed...
...Loach's sedulously literal-minded transcription of the same strategies results in a naturalism gone schizophrenic...
...Giovanna, ditched by Carlo, promptly becomes the mistress of Vittorio, whose ludicrous advances she had been spurning...
...I can relate a story very well, but I can't get it down on paper...
...Neither do we find the intensive humanity of Olmi, De Seta, Monicelli...
...Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me...
...Lottie, Charlie's wife, has dialogue of a somewhat jaded earthiness with real resonance and sting to it...
...The wife, of course, is tough and real and unspoiled by it all...
...After the lustiness of his work in Mandragola, delli Colli has, in The Hawks and the Sparrows and now here, arrived at a splendid flexibility of tones that can be misty or sharp, melancholy or biting, as desired...
...What is worse, he also stars: Finney the director places what is left over of himself in front of the camera...
...stepping outside, and promptly beleaguered by predatory friends or nosy strangers...
...Ennio Morricone's score has the right asperity, and Tonino delli Col-li's black-and-white photography improves with each film...
...Carlo must save the baby, so that Elena will have to marry him for its sake...
...The doctor now hypocritically thanks the priest, "It was my Road to Damascus...
...and promises a large donation to the parish poor, while Carlo wheels on him and demands a refund of the abortion fee...
...he is a nervous Nellie, which accounts both for his oppilation and his darting about...
...The doctor first denies having received any money, then hastily makes out a check, which Carlo pockets with the warning that he'll keep an eye on the doctor until Elena is safely delivered...
...nor yet the radical commitment of Rosi...
...I have the brains, but I haven't got the education...
...To carry off such a sophisticated blend of acrid irony and bittersweet farce is a considerable achievement, even if the squeamish may be fazed by Bellocchio, that uncommon kind of cultural watchdog whose bite is worse than his bark...
...it either dawns on one as a delayed reaction later on, or one savors it on viewing the film a second time, as one very nearly must...
...There are other nice touches...
...As his sister, Elda Tattoli (who collaborated with Bellocchio on the script) conveys precisely that romantic but also very modern state lapidarily defined by Carducci as "un tedio che duri infinito...
...Giovanna is secretary to the town's rich political dabbler, Vittorio...
...I take this to be a piece of symbolism...
...I knew you would come back to us someday...
...the nurse answering Carlo's threatening question about whether anything has been done yet with the idiot tone she doubtless uses on patients who want to know whether it will hurt?Noh . . . Noooh...
...professore, in Italian, has quite a low threshold), he becomes the rich nincompoop's campaign manager, and, almost simultaneously, Elena's lover...
...Poor Cow, directed by Kenneth Loach and adapted by him and Nell Dunn from her novel, is a lesson from Godard, poorly learned...
...The gradual revelations are thus all the more eagerly stalked by the spectator?unless it is he, in fact, who is being ambushed by them...
...Loach has adopted many Godardian devices, such as deliberately jerky progression, improvisations, interti-tles, long takes of intimate tete-a-tetes, and, above all, sudden switches from haphazard story-telling to quasi-documentary exploration of a milieu...
...it seems, of too short a duration for her to find out, and what she imagines is not much different from Steigian dreams of glory, only here the glory is made infantilely sour rather than infantile-Iy sweet...
...the precocious son is slightly spoiled but, of course, real and innocent and full of the instinctive wisdom of childhood...
...China Is Near (the title makes sense only in Italian, in which La Cina e vicina is a neat political jingle) is the story of poor but ambitious lovers in the little town of Imola near Bologna...
...When Delaney and Finney hit on a good gimmick, such as the multiple-screen closed-circuit television that enables Charlie to survey the activities in all parts of his house, they milk it shamelessly, both anec-dotally and photographically...
...not only does this accelerate the pace almost to the point of silent-screen comedy, it also creates an aura of amorality...
...Carry this a little further, and what have you got...
...The small-town Italian milieu has never been treated in this tone before...
...what it symbolizes is that Finney and Delaney couldn't think of a better ending for their trifling film...
...Nevertheless, Miss Delaney has an ear or two for dialogue, and the scene, for instance, in which an airman on leave cadges a ride with Charlie and his secretary and proceeds to monologize ("Do you still work, Sir, or do you just do the writing...
...Carlo and Giovanna then collaborate, like a provincial Valmont and Merteuil, to trap their aristocratic lovers into marriage, giving rise to some outrageous intrigues caustically filmed...
...Carol White, as the heroine, is not bad at all though a shade too respectable, and Terence Stamp is excellent as her lover...
...Ultimately, though, it is sui generis in its harshness that is yet comic, in its rapidity that remains encompassable, and in its sarcasm that is nevertheless hearty...
...Moreover, her role—a gushy American would-be writer, part secretary, part mistress to Charlie—is so awkward and extraneous that one suspects it was written in for Miss Minnelli...
...Miss Delaney is being vaguely autobiographical again, which is fine, but she is also being autobiographical about something that did not quite happen to her and that she does not really succeed in imagining...
...No, Bellocchio is his own man, and while he has learned a thing or two from Godard, he has already surpassed his master...
...A particularly effective device of Bellocchio's is to cut off an incident right after the climax and dispense with the denouement...
...Vittorio, for example, is first revealed sitting in some sort of cubicle, looking up plaintively and exclaiming...
...I wish I had the shooting script before me, so I could reproduce the series of quick cuts and hectic snatches of dialogue that follow: Elena looking exasperated on the operating table...
...whereupon we follow Charlie on one of his rare trips to Manchester to see his divorced wife and small son...
...The color photography by Peter Suschitsky is cleverly understated, and Mischa Donat's score is an acerbic distortion of saccharine melodies that does what the film merely aspires to...
...now Carlo seeks out his former parish priest, discovered playing games with a bunch of children who make an ass of him...
...Little escapes the playful claws of Bellocchio's wit: Higher and lower orders, Marxism and Maoism, youth and age, religion and politics, clergy and officialdom—all are grist for a camera that grinds fast, yet exceeding small...
...With lightning speed, and chiefly in visual terms, three points are made: Vittorio is the sort of histrionic fool who blames his constipation on God...
...Poor Cow flits uneasily from portentous-ness to down-to-earthness, as pseu-dopoetic and pseudonaive as one of Chagall's flying bovines...
...A History of China (how different a China from the one in the film's title...
...Such verbal felicities apart, the script has little to offer...
...Yet from the very outset, when the pop singer Donovan intones one of the self-consciously pseudopopular lyrics by the highbrow poet Christopher Logue...
...The swift pacing of the scene and the counterpointing of obtuseness with nastiness, of corruption with impotent fury, make for one of those true sardonic epiphanies in which our laughter is, as it were, lined with dismay...
...The whole thing is a pullulating anthill of pseudosophisticated prejudices: the successful writers at the club, beset by agents, lawyers, and such...
...Here we do not have the clinical penetrancy of Antonioni, the slightly melancholy euphoria of Fellini...
...the cheery sentimentalizing of the later De Sica or the social protest of the earlier...
...Consider the elaborate mastery of the scene in which Carlo foils Elena's attempt at abortion...
...Godard...
...From this ennui that lasts forever, lust alone can arouse her, only to submerge her in yet more bottomless boredom...
...Alan Lake's airman, too, is the apogee of guileless obnoxiousness...
...But this is not something one fully comprehends while it is happening...
...the priest going down on his knees to thank God...
...Albert Finney makes his directorial debut in Charlie Bubbles, and he proves less than inspired...
...Thus the aristocrats all have a certain derailed flamboyance, whereas the plebeian arrivistes go about their tasks with tight-lipped, matter-of-fact purposivenes6 that is more chilling than comic...
...The acting is cogently balanced by the director...
...Miss Delaney's success was...
...Another trouble lies with Shelagh Delaney's script...
...Glauco Mauri's Vittorio is the staggering embodiment of just about every folly catalogued by Erasmus, while remaining recognizably the fellow man and brother of every hypocrite spec-taleur...
...When Carlo discovers that the Socialist party is bypassing him as candidate for councilman in order to run the more prestigious but pretentious and inept Vittorio (not a "professor," as most reviewers have claimed, but a high-school teacher...
...China Is Near has been justly compared by Stanley Kauff-mann to Goldoni and by Andrew Sar-ris to Stendhal...
...There is a scene in which Vittorio and Elena are cataloguing the precious and musty tomes of the family library: He reads out the titles and she records them...
...And, surprisingly for one so young, there is none of that attitudinizing self-importance found in, say, Bertolucci...
...Next he opens a door, and we see that he has been sitting on a toilet...
...Lastly, there is Camillo, Elena's and Vittorio's teenage brother, a nasty little seminarian who has organized a Maoist cell comprising himself and two surly, reluctant followers, and who uses his Maoism in equal measure to frustrate his brother's political chances and to satisfy his own nascent dictatorial and sexual appetites...
...at home, bullied by their hired help...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 6
