WATCHING WOMEN WATCHERS

...But starting with an episode on a train, it began to engage me against my will...

...Jean-Claude decides that what Pierrot needs is a real woman, and the hungrier the better preferably a nun or a woman just out of prison...

...A few paragraphs later, he says to his aunt: "You were right...

...Odd as the comparison may be, Going Places succeeds where Daisy Miller fails: Both movies watch women-watchers, but only Going Places gives us a sense of the men who are doing the watching...

...It's a thoroughly believable and annoyingly erotic scene...

...We are continually told she is a puzzle, but what we see isn't puzzling at all...

...Throughout all this, the movie is painful and vicious...

...whom they more-or-less rape (she's unresponsive but not unwilling), shoot in the leg, "trade" for a car, insult with wisecracks about the smell of her genitals, and generally abuse because they can't make her "come...

...Daisy is its absolute center, and since she is portrayed as a narcissistic, empty-headed, vain, chattering flirt, the center does not hold...

...and though it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it very forgivingly of a want of finish...

...I did it...

...Watching them, I concluded that the movie is not about nihilistic youth after all if it were it wouldn't be so provocative...

...Yet what makes James' story more than a comedy of misplaced manners is that it is told not from Daisy's point of view, but only from that of a character named Winter-bourne, who is always at the edge of the reader's eye...

...They offer her money enough for a night with him in the biggest bed in town if she will suckle Pierrot...

...But one comes away from Daisy Miller wishing that he had resisted the temptation...

...he is the individual who is a witness to events because his passivity prevents him from being anything else...

...their curiosity about women...

...The action that interests Henry James, after all, is usually interior and invisible...

...Bogdanovich's Daisy is as clear and unmodulated as a cracked bell...

...I avoided seeing it for weeks, having heard it described as another woman-hating "road" picture about a pair of aimless buddies whose kicks are assault and battery...

...The men are angry because Jacques has found the secret Marie-Ange had all along...

...The poignancy of James' story derives less from Daisy's premature death than from Winterbourne's final discovery that in his own way he has misused her...

...One hundred and forty years ago Tocqueville described the American girl who, before marriage, is mistress of herself relatively unfettered by parental restrictions, exposed to the vices and perils of a society she sees without illusion...

...Perhaps the power of the story is contained in some literary quality that simply cannot be transferred to the screen...

...If she lacks her European counterpart's virginal candor, she lacks as well her timidity and childishness...

...Following Jeanne's death, the two boys return to Marie-Ange, and set up house with her and Jeanne's son, Jacques...

...We suspect that Daisy's cultural confusion served Winterbourne as an excuse for his own sexual paralysis...

...I was booked to make a mistake...

...As if this weren't bad enough, Daisy's little brother...

...On its most obvious level, James' novel recounts the experiences of such a girl among Americans long abroad, a society close enough to her own to be disarming, but one that she is unprepared for...

...The boys, on the move and going nowhere as usual, are headed for a beach, off-season...

...I should mention, however, that Cloris Leachman as Daisy's neurasthenic mother and Mildred Natwick as Winterbourne's aunt are marvelous, and that the sequences in Switzerland are beautifully framed and filmed...

...Nonetheless, that is how Winterbourne finds her, and because his sight is ours, we endow her with grace...

...Although the boys in question, Jean-Claude (Gerard Depardieu) and Pierrot (Patrick Dewaere), are 25-year-olds with an emotional age of five...

...When Jeanne tells the patronne of the restaurant that her menstrual periods gradually dwindled away in the 10 years she was in prison, it seems like a gratuitous, albeit touching incident...

...their desire to care and be cared for by women...

...She runs to tell her friends the good news...

...In her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony...

...She does so, reluctantly at first, then with increasing passion, as Jean-Claude caresses her other nipple...

...This Daisy is a high-pitched bitch we are delighted to be rid of when she disappears from the screen with malaria...

...In the first half hour they terrorize a middle-aged housewife...

...I did it...

...Jean-Claude and Pierrot watch her with fascination, and take great pleasure in satisfying her every need for food, for clothes, for sex...

...Moreover, the rhythm of the film and the fact that the violence one expects always exceeds the violence actually done, contribute to its boys-will-be-boys tone...

...Nothing was...

...Although he is faithful to the original dialogue, theme, mood, and, to a large extent, characters, he has managed to turn a fine tale into a boring film...

...their fear of sexual inadequacy...

...Abused Marie-Ange has made it through the film thus far with her frigidity woefully intact, and it is not Pierrot or Jean-Claude who helps her with her first orgasm but the novice Jacques...

...Still, I think there are other reasons for Bogdanovich's failure...

...Of his works, only Portrait of a Lady really strikes me as a possible movie...

...Randolph, is still more unpleasant to listen to...

...Giovanelli, Daisy's Roman companion, appears at her funeral and remarks to Winterbourne that she was the most innocent young lady he ever knew...

...But there are several references to menstruation in the movie and they aren't gratuitous, at least not in a film presenting men's confusion about the opposite sex...

...In all but physical presence, Winterbourne has been left out of Bogdanovich's movie...

...Again, Bogdanovich has not changed a word...

...There is an energy in Going Places which I'm not sure the people involved in making it knew it possessed...

...Daisy puzzles Winterbourne, and this puzzlement allows us to accept that while enchanted by her, he is also sufficiently uninvolved to feel no more than disappointment at her apparent indifference to him...

...At this point Jeanne Moreau enters the picture as Jeanne Piroles, an ex-convict who has nothing better to do than go with them...

...and abduct a young girl named Marie-Ange (Miou-Miou...

...I have lived too long in foreign parts...

...At the end of the novel James dispassionately informs us that Winterbourne has returned to Geneva, "whence there continue to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives: a report that he is 'studying' hard An intimation that he is much interested in a very clever foreign lady...

...I don't know if a good movie can be made from Henry James' Daisy Miller, but Peter Bogdanovich hasn't done it...

...And there are many others...

...Early in the film Pierrot is wounded in the testicles, and spends the next 20 minutes wondering if he'll ever be able to make love again...

...she exclaims...

...Similarly, the manner of Jeanne's unpredictable and hideous suicide A gun in her vagina-was unintelligible to me, though from Pierrot and Jean-Claude's perspective it is no more mysterious than menstruation, or nursing, or anything else concerning women...

...Indeed, she is so without charm that one turns back to James, thinking some part of her must have been omitted...

...And initially that's exactly what it is...

...Bogdanovich's interests have consistently been with the American scene, and I can see why the drama of an American abroad tempted him...

...and their bewilderment that women are different from them...

...Winterbourne describes Daisy's face as "not at all insipid, but . . . not exactly expressive...

...In the context of Pierrot's injury, the sequence with the nursing mother is crazily reminiscent of the Renaissance paintings of Charity nursing a toothless old beggar...

...One of the leitmotifs of all James' fiction is the failure of communication between human beings because of their opacity...

...Rather, it concerns men and their ambivalent urges to know, possess and please women...

...Their railroad car is empty except for a young, nursing mother who tells them she is on her way to meet her soldier husband after two months of not seeing him...

...Young, though older than Daisy, American by birth, though after years of expatriation more European than American in sensibility, he is the kind of man James focused on again and again...

...Winterbourne is first amazed, then angry, then rueful...

...and with Shepherd, who is incapable of nuance, delivering James' dialogue in a series of nonstop monologues, communication is not even given a chance to fail...

...rob a store...

...Cybill Shepherd's Daisy lacks the shadows Winterbourne's fascination gave her...

...In Europe, her gallantry shades into recklessness and coquetry, her willfulness into stupidity...

...Daisy is never depicted as interesting...

...Les Valseuses, a French best seller in 1972, has now been made by its author, Bertrand Blier, into a sexy, involving, sometimes infuriating movie titled Going Places...

...But he has forgotten that words made audible have a different impact from words read, and that screen presence is more overwhelming than fictional presence...

...It careens out of control, yet I can't think of another film that portrays as well if ironically men's vulnerability and their awe of women behind the masculine need for power...