On Screen

...Several weeks later, she begins to suspect she is pregnant...

...Customs Service, despite the fact that the explicit sex scenes were fewer and tamer than those in the standard fare on 42nd Street, or, for that matter, in Exhibition, the X-rated but uncensored sensation of last year's program...

...The Middleman, for example, was the fifth work by Satyajit Ray, the premier director of India, to be featured here over the years...

...Ray skillfully avoids the obvious: The distance separating Somnath and his father is not so much a "generation gap" as an ever-widening chasm dividing two cultures...

...On Screen SALVAGINGA LACKLUSTER FESTIVAL BY ROBERT ASAHINA The 14th annual New York Film Festival, held last month, brought together 30 movies from 10 countries—France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Poland, Switzerland, the United States, and the USSR...

...Following the press screening I attended, the movie was confiscated by the U.S...

...it was a pleasure to hear their German, particularly after the corrupt colloquialisms in another festival offering, Wim Wender's Kings of the Road...

...Happily, in Ray's case familiarity breeds continuing admiration...

...Rohmer was able to achieve this impressive feat because of his strict fidelity to the text (the one change, supposedly made in the interest of credibility, is open to debate, but hardly crucial...

...Ray's artistry lies in his ability to rise above this somewhat schematic plot—resembling that of, say, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz —and display more general insights about India's ambivalent acceptance of modernity...

...Its primary situations and scenes are the stock cliches found in the worst kinds of films about kids: the adolescent crushes, the first kiss, the disastrous haircut, the movie theater, the schoolroom, and the summer camp...

...This requires one of the young boys to be maltreated by his mother so that a school teacher can bludgeon us, toward the end, with a sermon about the horrors of child abuse...

...The movie makers represented in the proceedings were familiar, too...

...As always, France was slightly overrepresented, with five features and one short...

...If the selection committee's guidelines for affirmative action based on national origins were rather obscure, the choices nonetheless fell into familiar thematic categories...

...her family rather primly refuses on her behalf...

...There was the whatever-happened-to-the-radicals-of-the-1960s film, Alain Tanner's Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (last year's offering was Robert Kramer and John Douglas' Milestones...

...The Middleman tells the story of Somnath (Pradip Mukherjee), a young man whose career prospects are dashed when he fails to graduate with honors from the university in Calcutta...

...That makes The Marquise of O intellectually noteworthy, but it is also beautifully styled and executed...

...Still, the 14th New York Film Festival failed to give us anything more than these two unqualified successes...

...used to screen the vast numbers of overqualified applicants in a steadily dwindling job market...

...The Count ultimately lives up to his misdeed, and they live happily ever after...

...Although the logic behind the numbers was never quite made clear, I suppose that so many American short subjects were chosen simply because they would not otherwise have reached a large audience...

...he also moves between the traditional yet inadequate pieties of his father and the utilitarian, amoral practices of Calcutta's small-time operators...

...Under the tutelage of a shrewd public-relations man (Utpal Dutt), his naive idealism eventually gives way to the cynicism required for survival among the hustlers in Calcutta's teeming marketplace, and he literally becomes a pimp...

...that sinks the silly sentimentalizing of the rest of the movie...

...This is important, because the actors engage in seemingly excessive displays of emotion—true to Kleist's descriptions, they throw themselves at one another's feet, fall into one another's arms, burst into tears...

...Yet the same reason would seem to militate against the French selections...

...The result is an esthetic distance between the audience and the screen, just as Kleist's exact and succinct phrases distance the readers of his story...

...The U.S...

...And there were the "retrospectives," the showings of old works by old masters: Jean Renoir's second film, Nana (1926), and Luchino Visconti's first, Osses-sione (1942...

...And the violent conclusion of In the Realm of the Senses was only slightly more graphic than the similar ending of The Last Woman ("On Screen," NL, July 5), shown in Manhattan for several weeks without raising any howls of protest...

...He does so in part by providing a visual counterpart to Kleist's prose: a precise balance of colors, action and speech that avoids romantic sentimentality as well as easy irony—he gives us cool shades (white dresses and the blue-gray interiors), carefully blocked movements and scrupulous enunciation...

...His players have had extensive theatrical experience...

...Probably the most prolific veteran figure at the festival was Truffaut...

...More than anything else, Ray is a master of the visual, and The Middleman offers striking proof —in black and white—of his power to illuminate genuine human dilemmas...

...Based on the true story of an all-consuming affair between a geisha and a gangster, the film climaxes in a brutal strangulation and castration...

...Except for some overly heavy-handed symbolism, he relies on an understated style best expressed in the carefully wrought chiaroscuros that subtly imply Somnath's darkening moods...

...What makes Small Change particularly annoying, though, is Truf-faut's determined effort to inject a "serious" message into it...

...Sadly, Small Change—the Frenchman's 15th full-length film since 1959—is small potatoes compared even to his entry last year, The Story of Adele H. Once again he has returned to children and childhood, the subject of his first, semi-autobiographical feature, The 400 Blows...

...A joint Franco-German production, the film is an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 short story of the same name...

...By avoiding the slightest hint of parody, he has shown it is possible to present the past without being patronizing...

...Unbeknown to all except the Count is his motive for asking: The night of the attempted rape, after the Marquise had been sedated to help her sleep (the only change in the adaptation...

...they probably could enjoy wide distribution without festival exposure...

...One of them, in fact, Francois Truffaut's Small Change, began its run on the Upper East Side of New York while the festival was still under way at Lincoln Center...

...Russian soldiers overrun the post and are about to rape her when she is rescued by a young Russian Count (Bruno Ganz), who quickly disappears before she is able to thank him...

...Subsequently, the Marquise's suspicions are confirmed and her scandalized family throws her out...

...At the same time, the Count mysteriously reappears and pleads for her hand in marriage...

...But Small Change is entirely lacking in the emotional and moral resonance of the earlier work...

...It is all very well intentioned...

...Truffaut's program notes and remarks at a New York press conference clearly indicate that he is deadly in earnest about the problem...

...For nearly a year, he is repeatedly refused employment because he cannot answer the arbitrary questions ("What is the weight of the moon...

...Nevertheless, his concern embarrassingly translates into a leaden weight of propaganda (for the right of children to vote, no less...

...He is the man in the middle, unable to embrace either extreme, but drawn to both...

...There was the obligatory excursion into metaphysical muddles, Eduardo de Gregorio's Serail, translated as "Surreal Estate" (last year, Louis Malle's Black Moon...

...seemed somewhat under-represented, since 10 of its 12 films were featurettes and the remaining two were documentaries...

...Desperate, she places an advertisement urging the father to reveal who he is...

...The separation, as Rohmer has observed, allows us to appreciate the tension between the outward manifestations of feeling and the equally external moral code binding the characters, on the one hand, and their inner feelings, about which we learn nothing directly, on the other...

...In desperation, and against the wishes of his father (Satya Baner-jee) and the traditions of his Brahmin caste ("Nobody in our family ever went into business"), he decides to become an "order-supplier," a freelance commission agent who buys cheap from wholesalers and sells dear to retailers...

...Another staple ingredient of the 17-day marathon is controversy, and this year's cause celebre was Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses...

...in the original, she merely faints), he took advantage of her himself...

...IT is particularly a pleasure, therefore, to report that the old guard of the New Wave was well represented anyway, by Eric Roh-mer's The Marquise of O the triumph of this year's (admittedly thin) program...

...Remarkably, Rohmer renders the story in a fashion that absolutely refuses to permit our condescension toward a plot and characters in danger of appearing foolish to modern sensibilities...

...A festival that presents such films as Rohmer's and Ray's can scarcely be deemed a failure...

...It has been an obsessive concern throughout his career, stemming, perhaps, from his well-publicized personal history of juvenile delinquency...

...Somnath shuttles between wholesaler and retailer...

...If the dialogue were not in French, we might think we were watching a 1940s MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland...

...The Marquise (Edith Clever), a widow with two children, lives in a fort commanded by her father (Peter Luhr...