Progress and Regression

...Unerotic, secondly, because the sex scenes are full of humorous or unglamorous details, which prove distinctly anaphrodisiac...

...Defiantly, the lovers copulate on the balustrade of the Royal Palace...

...There is oral sex and, in a dream sequence, castration...

...There are tender lovemakings and querulous ones...

...Miss Seyrig's natural talent is far greater than the Method, and it is a pity to swap pate de foie gras de Strasbourg for chopped chicken livers de Strasberg...

...Thus Truffaut's ending The 400 Blows with a freeze shot has been parroted in a short time by so many films that it has promptly become one of the most vacuous cinematic platitudes...

...at young Sandy for getting her dismissed, we cut to Chapel and all the girls singing "Lord, dismiss us...

...Stolen Kisses is once more that special Truffaut blend of sentimentality and screwiness, of an alert eye, a spunky technique, and a respect for the zaniness of life...

...And there is a poesie de deux sous—a puerile yet insinuating lyricism?about everything Truffaut does in this film (as in Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim) that unabashedly sashays into our souls...

...that there are as many real moments of cinema-verite as bits of staged cinema-verite and "story" sequences...

...Maggie Smith is fine in the quieter moments of the part, but much of the time she does a grossly mannered, female-impersonatorish camping around—which undoubtedly earned her the praises of our most masculine female and feminine male reviewers...

...and there is even a fantasy where the government adopts nonviolent resistance as the official policy...

...But / Am Curious (Yellow) is interesting in its shimmering, multifarious approach to life in Sweden today, in its frankness about sex, and in the considerable step ahead it marks in Vilgot Sjoman's artistic development...

...Declaring his definitive and immutable love for the girl, he assures her that she will belong to him and gives her a little time to break off such temporary relationships as the one with Antoine...

...Whether that makes the film better or worse is a question I leave open...

...The answer is, more than anything else, quick imitation...

...When people are dancing, we always begin with closeups of their feet...

...After the man stalks off, the stupefied young lovers also leave, commenting about his complete craziness...

...By the time a Fellini or Antonioni makes one or two genuine Fellinis or Antonionis, there have sprouted all over the world dozens of pseudo-Fellinis, scores of pseudo-Antonionis...

...after one has spent an evening in Stockholm discussing it with its maker, Vilgot Sjoman...

...It's likable all right, this Baisers voles...

...And there are motifs that seem insufficiently developed, while others are dawdled over...

...If a writer evolves a new technique, it takes a relatively long time for it to become understood, accepted, and emulated...

...There may have even been Method improvisation in her big scene, which would account for the bad grammar of "toutes les femmes sont exceptionnelles—chacune a leur tour...

...Similarly, Resnais' fragmentation and scrambling of the time-and-place sequence in Hiroshima, Mon Amour has become overnight an accepted—almost conventional—mode of film structure, applied rightly or ridiculously to everything from psychological studies to trivial love stories...

...This brings us to her other problems...

...During the prolonged and thunderous ovation that followed, I had ample time to decipher his name on my darkness-enshrouded program: Andre Falcon...

...The song contains the phrase "baisers voles," which is the film's title and provides a theme for Antoine Duhamel's otherwise undistinguished score...

...One wonders why film exhausts its major talents so quickly...

...in that case this marks a few modest paces forward again, in the direction of his splendid early achievements...

...Sjoman's controversial film concerns the quest of a girl called Lena Nyman for her selfhood: political, social, and sexual...

...Who was this stocky, grizzled, ineptly gesticulating Belcredi...

...rightly assumes that the audience cannot make out an un-dotted "i" or an uncrossed "t...

...experimentally, in what is said to be Europe's oldest tree...

...is too aimless, casual, slight...

...Twenty-one years ago I went to the Comedie Francaise to see Le Cid, featuring the then ruling jeune premier...

...When a husband catches his wife in bed with another man and is urged by his private eye to cause a fracas, instead of throwing a handy vase at his unrepentant spouse, he removes the long-stemmed yellow irises from the vase and pelts her adulterous bosom with these angry caresses...

...after one has written a polemical piece defending it in the Times and stood up for it in a radio debate—one is somewhat tired of / Am Curious (Yellow) and would just as soon not have to review it...

...Film, however, displays its novelties perspicuously, palpably, immediately—there are no serious problems of translation, dissemination, interpretation, and film is mass-produced and mass-consumed everywhere...

...Stolen Kisses opens and closes with a charming Charles Tre-net song, sung by Trenet himself on the sound track, "Que devient-il de tout cela...

...It becomes hard, indeed impossible, to tell which level is up...

...so what...

...Lena and Borje make love in various places, moods, and positions...

...Politically, she demonstrates for various Left-wing causes, especially nonviolent resistance...

...Sjoman achieves a hyper-Piran-dellian conundrum, some of it amusing and some merely a bother...

...The penetration of the artistic medium and of human nature, the keener illumination of the Now and the Always?what has become of all that...

...Artistically, the film has its weaknesses...

...Allen's flatiron...

...As Antoine, with suitable grimaces, rings ever more frantic changes on, tries to wrest ever more essential meaning from the three names, a bizarre spell emanates from the screen...

...The most superficially cinematic filmmaker of our time, Godard, is also the most aped...

...The tone is one of youthful turbulence and pathos recollected in wistfully smiling tranquillity, and Truffaut is a master of bittersweet buffoonery down to such details as an embarrassed man's black-gloved hand clasping its nakedly white mate in pained bewilderment...

...She is a disciple of Lee Stras-berg and has turned to a kind of Method acting: excessive tinkering with her words, arrested development in her phrasing, an inward and downward pushing of the voice...

...Martin Luther King and the King of Sweden...

...Scarcely less good is Lena's imaginary encounter with the King, and some of the responses of anonymous interviewees are of all too human interest...

...No step ahead, alas, is Francois Truffaut's new film, Stolen Kisses, unless we count the giant steps backward taken by his last three films...

...This is, of course, as much the fault of the industry, which wrongly or (alas...

...some in fun, some in fury...

...What has become of all that...

...sexually, she is experimenting in depth with a lover, her 24th...

...First it is that of the older woman (she is married to the man for whom he works as a spy and seems unattainable), then that of the young girl (she seems to have lost all interest in him), and lastly his own...

...Ronald Neame's old-hat direction assists the process of vulgarization...

...But also at work is a very contemporary absurdist touch...

...Celia Johnson, inevitably yet heartbreakingly aged, does a beautifully restrained job as the headmistress, and, among the girls, Pamela Franklin and Jane Carr were especially impressive...

...But this loose sequence of adventures and misadventures befalling Antoine Doinel (the child hero of The 400 Blows) upon his dishonorable discharge from military service?You have pull," grumbles the CO, "you must have Communist friends...

...Peter Wester's cinematography, which tries for a spontaneous news-reel look, is at times a bit too slapdash...

...With this the film ends: absurd and sentimental, but more absurd than sentimental...

...Nevertheless, the point that fantasy, fiction, wishful thinking, and reality are all equally meaningful and, in some senses, interchangeable, is made well enough...

...It is a litany of despair, and a magic incantation, and a scientific attempt at dissecting a precious name...

...I have seen Blue, a much weaker film though not without its moments, and must regretfully report that some pieces that belong in one film have ended up in the other, contributing to the depletion and confusion of both...

...Or take the closing scene, when Antoine has finally (if anything in this makeshift, zigzagging existence can be called final) settled on the young girl, and sits with her on a bench as a man who has been following the girl throughout the film accosts them...

...Though varied, the sexuality is never erotic...

...Comes the famous tirade, and the blond, wavy-haired, stocky young man delivers it with every odious rhetorical curlicue, every street-corner oratorical gesture, every bit of emphase that passes for greatness in that venerable showcase of theatrical antiquities...

...Particularly fine are the scenes with the father (played touchingly by Peter Lindgren), full of unresolved conflict and, on his part, scrupulous evasiveness...

...Sjoman shot too much footage, so that he ended up making two versons of / Am Curious, Yellow and Blue, named after the colors of the Swedish flag...

...But these things tend to escape notice, for attention avidly focuses on the sex scenes...

...I uttered my nunc dimittis well before that...

...It is like a lemon drop, or a poem by Jacques Prevert, or an old photograph of a first love whom the passage of time and change of fashions have made slightly ridiculous-looking...

...whether, for instance, a lovers' quarrel is part of the fiction or of the framework, and whether the framework itself isn't really fiction...

...The more filmic your invention, the more it is copied...

...A look at the program: Andre Falcon...

...the most intellectual and "literary" one, Bergman, remains the least imitated or imitable...

...Again, when Antoine sends a pneumatique to the married woman he worships but wishes to give up in the manner of the hero of Balzac's Le Lys dans la vallee, the camera lovingly follows the whole uniquely Parisian and by now somewhat antiquated procedure of delivering the petit bleu through a network of underground tubes...

...Truffaut's misfortune is to be so engagingly, seductively, accessibly filmic that his imitators have exhausted him before his time...

...after Miss Brodie has hurled her despairing (and echo-reinforced) cry of "Assassin...

...We thought he was a private detective but discover that he is a clandestine suitor...

...The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie lost a good deal in its stage simplification by Jay Presson Allen, and loses still more in her movie reduction of that stage version...

...Last year in Paris, I saw Sacha Pitoeff's appalling production of Pirandello's Henry IV, and in a generally poor cast that included Claude Jade, there was one performance that managed to surpass even the wretched Pitoeff and his worse wife in sheer horror...

...The acting and direction of actors are good...

...So Antoine stumbles into and fumbles such jobs as soldiering, hotel night-clerking, and private investigating, to end up as a tv repair man (for how long...

...socially, she has organized a group of young people to go around with tape recorders and interview people about whether Sweden is a classless society, the findings to be studied by the Lena Nyman Institute...

...What complicates matters is that we often see Sjoman and his crew making the film and getting into the Pirandellian act...

...now he works in a frame shop, is mistrusted by his daughter and despises himself...

...And here he is again, an eyesore in Stolen Kisses, further proof of Truffaut's sentimentality—in this case about a quondam star of the Francais...

...Not that Muriel Spark's novella is so very complex a work, but its subtleties of narrative technique, its ambiguities of character, and its moral dilemma have all been twice subjected to Mrs...

...For example, an infestation with body lice that Lena passes on to Borje in Yellow is explained by a dalliance a trois with a married couple in whose car Lena hitches a ride in Blue...

...Not much...

...Miss Seyrig was brilliant in the play, but she was using exactly the same persona as in Stolen Kisses: same looks, same delivery, same mannerisms...

...Antoine, shaving before his mirror, suddenly begins to intone, over and over, three names, each for something like a minute...

...yet from someone whose first films were so innovative, so individual and challenging, we want more...

...Claude Jade is pretty and typically French as the ingenue (her bad legs merely add to her typical Frenchness), and the gifted Del-phine Seyrig would be marvelous as the older woman but for two things...

...Unerotic, first, because neither of the young people is particularly attractive—Lena, in fact, is downright bovine, but her liveliness is almost as good as loveliness...

...And Lena's struggles to achieve nonviolence in her various selves—as a political and a private person, as mistress and daughter—are animatedly chronicled in their partial victories and considerable setbacks...

...There is Lena as a character in the story, but there is also a real-life Lena, who has an affair with the director-scenarist Sjoman (as she did in real life), then goes on to having one with Borje Ahl-stedt, the actor who plays her lover in the film...

...But in addition, I dare say, there is a lack of substance in his vision...

...is indeed the prevailing mood of the film as young Antoine Doinel fluctuates between a sophisticated older woman and an only slightly less sophisticated gamine (not to mention an occasional prostitute), and goes from job to outlandish job...

...Truffaut's tone is both modern and reminiscent, both sweet and acerbic...

...Is this poetry or absurdity—the folly of youth attempting to find the true pitch of reality, or the existential anguish of mortal man trying to grasp the fleeting identity of the beloved or the self...

...Lena also has family problems with her father, in whose house she lives: He had gone to fight Franco in '37 but quit after a couple of weeks...

...In the smaller parts, Michel Lonsdale is primus inter pares as a thriving businessman obtusely puzzled by his unpopularity...

...Distressing, though, was the presence in the film of Andre Falcon as the head of the detective agency...

...A magician performing tricks in a night club provides the accompanying patter in sweetly silly doggerel...

...so he goes from a lightning affair with the married woman to a more viable one with the girl (for how long...

...One is that, after seeing this film in Paris last fall, I caught her in a mediocre play by Jean-Claude Car-riere (who is, among other things, Bunuel's unfortunate scenarist...

...But minor parts get caricatured, Edinburgh is wasted, and Ted Moore's color photography seems uneven, though the trouble may lie in the print: With every change of reel there was about as much change of color values as between the palettes of Bonnard and Puvis de Cha-vannes...

...that there are authentic interviews with men like the brilliant young Swedish Cabinet member, Olof Palme, and imaginary ones with Evtushenko, Dr...

...Jean-Pierre Leaud continues to be the quintessential Parisian dropout, but under Truf-faut he is not so loutish and dreary as under Godard...

...Finally, the film never probes deeply enough, precisely because it probes away in so many directions...

...The film functions on several levels...

...when two pubescent girls speculate about sexual intercourse?they're bound to be put off their passion with their clothes off"—a phonograph record suggestively runs down...