Madness. Public and Private

...On Screen MADNESS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BY JOHN SIMON Although not so great as me borrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls' new documentary about the Ulster troubles, A Sense of Loss, is a very considerable achievement In the earlier film, about World War II, historic perspective has already pretty much sorted things out, and we can make use of Olympian hindsight in distributing merits and demerits to the benighted creatures who thrashed about in horrors and uncertainties In the new movie, we are plunged right into a bloody chaos, and no one—participants, filmmakers, audience—can be sure of what the solutions are, or how they might be implemented The situation in Northern Ireland might seem like mere local skirmishing viewed from our transatlantic safety But it is as sanguinary, desperate and intransigent as any human violence can be, and can serve as a model for civil warfare or border conflict anywhere blacks against whites in America, Jews against Arabs, Indians against Pakistanis, plus all the African bloodshed, past, present and future The hatred between Irish Protestants and Catholics has many powerful bases religious, m a country where religion still deeply matters, historical-traditional, where such an issue as union with England versus a free, united Ireland is ancient, ingrained and hotly contested, economic, given that the Protestants tend to be the haves and the Catholics the have-nots Ophuls was faced with problems beyond the fact that the fighting is still in full swing There is the difficulty of our relative ignorance about Irish politics compared to the German occupation of France, for example There is the further difficulty that both among the Catholics and the Protestants there are numerous parties and factions ranging from extremism to liberalism, whose exact platforms (even assuming they exist) are hard to make clear in a 135-minute film—especially when members of the same organization (eg, the regular IRA—as opposed to the Provisionals, newly formed in Ulster) disagree among themselves Then, too, people are understandably unwilling to discuss their file gal activities Finally, despite their proverbial gift of gab, some of these Irish express themselves poorly, to say nothing of accents that are sometimes bad enough to make one yearn for subtitles Nevertheless, Ophuls' film takes on deep significance and fascination once we look beyond the immediate situation, stirring as it may be At that point, the people involved cease to be Bernadette Devlin or Sir Harry Tuzo, Commander of the British Forces in Northern Ireland, the Reverend Ian Paisley, a rabble-rousing ultraconservative Ulster Protestant leader, or the two Catholic fathers we meet, one fairly chauvinistic, the other reasonable and iconoclastically humane Suddenly, we are confronted with basic human attitudes in a timeless conflict the internecine strife that has always divided humanity and set it to murdering itself A Sense of Loss then becomes more like a medieval morality play, only less medieval than eternal, and less a morality than an immorality For we can see no moral resolutions to these religious antagonisms, to these acts of violence that, even when the doctrine is half forgotten, are still doctrinaire and proliferate in all directions We encounter voices of reason and acts of humanitarian-ism, but we realize them to be pitifully outnumbered The four specific deaths Ophuls concentrates on are particularly revealing One is that of a baby, the archetype of innocence Another is that of a teen-age girl returning late from a dance—the most romantic tragedy Death and the Maiden Still another is that of an affluent Protestant businessman who, discovering an unexploded bomb in a department store, carried it out in order to save innocent lives and blew himself up doing it, here a member of a presumably reactionary group proved himself most gallantly self sacrificing The fourth death, of a provisional IRA lieutenant shot by the British troops during an armed engagement, is the only militant one Ophuls concentrates on the man's funeral and captures some bitter ironies The family denies his IRA associations, thus, in a sense, posthumously castrating him Still more terribly ironic are the faces of the mourners hate filled rather than grieving Particularly frightening is a huge, fat termagant—a young woman clearly m the Provisionals—who marches at the head of the cortege There is enough unthinking hatred m her face and bearing to keep a revolution fueled for decades There is also a great deal of talk from people m high and low stations, some of it quite perceptive, but none offering workable solutions Most of the people ring changes on the re fram Why did it have to be him, her, us9 When a Catholic mother is told that overpopulation among Catholics may have something to do with their problems, her suggestion is that the Protestants make more babies, too When a strikingly handsome, seemingly civilized Protestant printer is asked whether the hate ridden doggerel about Catholics he prints might not stir up deadly conflagrations, he denies this, citing as proof that a (Protestant) court freed him of such charges And irony of ironies The militant Catholics and Protestants are equally against abortion and birth control measures that might eventually ease the situation Perhaps the only thing Ophuls leaves deliberately veiled, though he hints at it sufficiently, is the extent to which religion is at the root of the misery A caustic Protestant journalist suggests that all the clergymen and their secular warriors be put on a raft and turned loose at sea Quixotic as the solution is, it appears only slightly less practical than Bernadette Devlin's barnstorming on behalf of Socialism, a movement that seems to leave almost the entire country apathetic, if not downright hostile, toward it What Ophuls has accomplished in this invaluable film—possibly more clearly even than m his previous greater one—is to show how hopeless the human predicament is And he shows it with excitingly incisive on-the-spot color cinematography and with some of the most cogent questions directed at high and low alike But the answers—however good or bad and, sometimes, even witty—are all short on hope for the human race, even if only implicitly By way of a final irony, this makes the decent, thoughtful, socially responsible people in the film look all the more touching saints m the lost cause of sanctifying mankind A suitable pendant to A Sense of Loss is Ken Loach's Wednesday's Child, a title that senselessly deviates from the original British one Family Life David Mercer's script, based on a TV play of his own, concerns a middle-class London family who manage to drive one of their daughters into schizophrenia Janice is a confused and not very strong-willed girl, but m no way unusual in either her bad or good traits She has not broken away from home like her married sister Barbara, and she is caught among boring jobs, the ossified bourgeois values of her parents, and the radical ones of her painter boyfriend, Tim She is justly dissatisfied with the caricatures of sympathy and understanding she gets from her father, a hard, dull worker, and from her mother, a concerned, not unclever woman but self-righteous and unimaginative Yet she does not have the talent or courage—or simply the masculinity—that permits Tim to survive without a family life Unfortunately these basic aspects of the problem are accorded rather sketchy treatment and emerge, if at all, in tiny flashes scattered throughout the film Handled more convincingly is the attrition between parents and daughter once Janice's behavior begins to take on pronouncedly schizoid characteristics Best of all is the handling of Janice's clinical history She becomes, first, the patient of an R D Laing-like radical psychiatrist who treats her sympathetically and conversationally, and also has revealing sessions with her repressed parents Dr Donaldson finally takes her into his highly unconventional "institution," modeled on Laing's Kingsley Hall Just as Janice is beginning to make genuine improvements, narrow minded and, presumably, jealous rivals manage to relieve Dr Donaldson of his post Janice then falls into the hands of the behaviorists These behavioral psychiatrists subject the girl to old-fashioned, obtuse forms of treatment, which, though restramedly chronicled by the film, appear horrifying and alas, believable The shock-therapy scenes, in their very understatement, are almost unforgettably disturbing, in this artistically understated filmization, they constitute a much more shattering indictment than m previous, more sensational moviemaking How Janice is ruined for life by official, state-subsidized psychiatry is depicted both faithfully (as a panel of psychiatrists after the picture's screening at the New York Film Festival affirmed) and with a finesse I would not have expected from either David Mercer or Ken Loach It is regrettable that, while Janice's worsening encounters with her parents are traced with convincing meticulousness, her relationships with her boy friend and married sister are treated spasmodically and unpersuasively Why these two benevolent figures fail to help her remains unanalyzed and looks like loading the dice against her The film is, nonetheless, aptly photographed and directed It has a splendid gallery of minor characters mostly patients and hospital staff, and the major performances ring true Sandy Ratcliff is a deeply moving Janice, precisely because she remains unsentimentalized Bill Dean's Father is properly more abjectly helpless than brutish As the Mother a nonprofessional actress, Grace Cave, gives a performance so detailed, so subtly shaded, so friendishly and heartbreakingly exact, as to make it—m both senses of the word—stunning...