Old Hat, New Voices

ASAHINA, ROBERT

On Screen OLD HAT, NEW VOICES BY ROBERT ASAHINA The 15th annual New York Film Festival that ended last month, hailed even before it opened as "the best in years," would perhaps have been better...

...His seventh New York selection, That Obscure Object of Desire, contains the usual Bunuel ingredients: startling non sequiturs...
...When Francois enters her life, we can see clearly that she is totally incapable of loving him, much less dealing with his love for her...
...the bizarre treated as the commonplace (a pig in swaddling clothes evoking no response from bystanders...
...Naturally he doesn't, and for a very good reason: The woman at the rendezvous is the cousin of the one Bertrand originally spotted...
...For this exercise in female boosterism is about as serious a view of feminism as The Man Who Loved Women is of Don Juanism...
...It is not at all what Vincent Canby thinks it is: "The Lacemaker, though it is nicely acted and set, is only interesting and moving in a theoretical way...
...The two eventually return to Paris and set up house together, but gradually find themselves moving farther and farther apart...
...They are, instead, fanciful females who are conceived according to a decidedly non-feminist (if not antifeminist) perspective: The one thing either of them seems to do well is bear babies...
...it is frustration at his inability to break through her anesthetized state, and ultimately guilt because of the dawning that his callow self-confidence has landed him beyond his depth...
...In fact, Truffaut tends to present his main character in terms of howling cliches...
...only then does he realize the enormity of the responsibility he assumed when they fell in love...
...The movie concludes with the stirring pronouncement that Suzanne and Apple "had fought to gain the happiness of being a woman...
...Thus Conchita is played by two actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina), who alternate scenes in keeping with the character's fickle moods, or perhaps with Mathieu's volatile desires...
...That Varda's film, after opening the festival, has gone on to a well-publicized Manhattan run while Women has been largely ignored is absurd...
...The inane characterizations are matched by the schematic story...
...But good as confession may be for the soul, it is not necessarily good on the screen: The director has failed to illuminate the psychology of his hero in any interesting way (regardless of whatever extracine-matic curiosity we may have about his own personal history...
...Meszaros displays as well a sophisticated awareness of how to shoot a scene...
...Apple, who has babies with the nonchalance of a dog having litters, plays at one lifestyle after another: a street musician, a jet-setter, a housewife, a mother...
...Meszaro's lone rival at the festival this year was Claude Goretta, perhaps best known in this country for his one past festival showing, The Wonderful Crook (1975...
...Throughout the movie, we are subjected to his equally uninteresting friends (Tina Irissari, Henri de Mau-blanc and Laetitia Carcano), his puerile discontent ("1 reject all politics"), and his self-indulgent despair ("I'm not sick-my sickness is seeing too clearly...
...Miss Huppert is all too believable as a figure of idealized innocence who would drive any ordinary man out of his mind with boredom and then, in a final irony, leave him feeling guilty for not having sufficiently appreciated the rare gift that briefly had been his...
...recurring gags (with a mousetrap and a burlap bag) that never really pay off...
...Secondly, far from offering Francois a "rare gift" as she starts tentatively to respond to him and to herself, Pomme is burdening him with a responsibility-for her very sense of being alive-that he is incapable of shouldering...
...even more impressive is Vlady, who has not really shone since starring in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her in 1966...
...Although the screenplay exhibits an extraordinary sensitivity to the petty emotions and minor events that shape a relationship, it is Meszaros' direction that is primarily responsible for the film's success...
...The one who sings, Pauline, nicknamed "Apple" (Valerie Mairesse), and the one who doesn't, Suzanne (Therese Liotard), bear practically no resemblance to real women...
...her technical decisions are always in the service of her understanding of the drama...
...Truffaut's 17th feature and sixth to be shown at the festival, The Man Who Loved Women, continues the dismal downward trend of his career...
...It is not a "stunning dramatic moment" (as Haskell would have us believe), or "the terrible event that welded their friendship" (as Varda's voiceover narration announces...
...Hup-pert's carefully modulated performance gradually reveals that she is something quite different: a truly pathetic creature whose unfamiliarity with others' emotions is exceeded by her unfamiliarity with her own...
...The Lacemaker establishes Claude Goretta as one of the leading contemporary filmmakers...
...But as it turned out, the greatest excitement was provided by a newcomer and a director tapped to participate just once before...
...She elicits very strong performances from the two leads: Juli, with her sharply contrasting moods and emotional outbursts, is a wonderful part for a young actress, and Monori is excellent in it...
...On Screen OLD HAT, NEW VOICES BY ROBERT ASAHINA The 15th annual New York Film Festival that ended last month, hailed even before it opened as "the best in years," would perhaps have been better characterized as "the most familiar...
...He presented The Lacemaker, starring Isa-belle Huppert (recently seen in Ber-trand Blier's Going Places) as Pom-me, a young apprentice at a beauty parlor in Paris...
...Perhaps Molly Haskell makes a habit of misreading films to suit her ideological inclinations (feminist, auteurist...
...Varda's simpleminded polemic, with its implicit suggestion that women should be kept in their place (on the farm, breeding children), especially suffers by contrast with Women, festival newcomer Marta Meszaros' seventh feature...
...Bunuel is still capable of throw-away effects that would make any of his peers envious...
...Unfortunately, 80 minutes of two characters (Duras and Gerard Depardieu) sitting and talking, intercut with footage of a truck rolling through the French countryside, can seem like eight hours...
...Suzanne mopes around, waiting for Mr...
...it is a mechanical trick, springing from Bunuel's will rather than his imagination...
...Still, every new Truffaut film continues to be greeted with reflexive hosannas and acclaimed as yet another masterpiece...
...Juli is her most unruly charge...
...The father of Suzanne's children hangs himself about 20 minutes into the film in what is little more than a plot device for throwing the two women together, and an arbitrary contrivance for generating unearned poignancy...
...Evidently, Canby never quite got the point...
...This short summary scarcely does justice to Goretta's richly textured script (written with Pascal Laine, from his novel...
...That Mathieu remains unruffled through it all is probably Bunuel's point, yet the character's inner turmoil and the chaotic condition of the outer world are never adequately integrated, merely arbitrarily juxtaposed...
...until that changes, Duras and Bresson will deserve little of the acclaim they are now receiving...
...from kitsch (Fahrenheit 451, 1966) to camp (The Bride Wore Black, 1967...
...His latest effort concerns a tiresome youth, Charles (Antoine Monnier), who is so alienated from society that he hires an acquaintance to shoot him...
...In the past, Truffaut's technical abilities partly disguised the limitations of some of his endeavors...
...The director eschews fancy camera work that calls attention to itself and detracts from the sense of a scene...
...Consider a scene involving a bus accident, described by Vincent Canby in what 1 assume were intended as words of praise: "Only Bresson would have the nerve to keep his camera on the feet of the passengers instead of showing us what then happens in the street...
...The Devil Probably, his 12th feature and sixth festival entry, offers further confirmation that he is the most wildly overrated contemporary filmmaker...
...Apparently the adulation of his diehard devotees obscures their powers of perception...
...Francois Truffaut presents a slightly more complicated problem...
...To be sure, Huppert's technically brilliant acting is emotionally under very strict control, but the fact that the character she plays is nearly affectless should not inhibit our feelings about the film quite the contrary...
...Finally, it is certainly not boredom that plagues Francois...
...Canby confuses nerve with ineptitude: The net effect of Bresson's concentration on peripheral details is losing what should be at the center of attention...
...Robert Bresson, on the other hand, gave us about what we should have expected: a tedious and phony spectacle...
...This has the desired effect of underscoring Janos' erratic behavior and simultaneously emphasizing Man's essentially passive role in the exchange...
...While vacationing on the Normandy coast, she falls in love with a university student, Francois (Yves Beneyton...
...That anyone could find The Lacemaker "only interesting and moving in a theoretical way" is almost impossible for me to believe...
...Imagine feminists' disdain if an American movie were to present two continually pregnant communards who meandered about singing Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman...
...Molly Haskell's inaccurate rendition of an important moment in this latest film is a case in point: "So shamelessly does Bertrand concentrate on the parts rather than the whole that when a woman whose ankles have lured him cross-country shows up for a rendezvous, he doesn't recognize her...
...Old faces abounded, with 11 of the directors whose works were placed on view having a total of 46 previous festival showings to their credit...
...Too often, what are intended as surreal or ironic gestures come off as empty mannerisms...
...here they have finally failed him...
...A semiautobiographical story of a middle-aged Don Juan, Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner), the movie has predictably been pronounced a triumph of personal filmmaking by auteur critics...
...Heading the old-timers' list was the master, Luis Bunuel, now 77...
...Since those triumphs, however, he has piddled away his considerable talents on a series of inconsequential movies, ranging from the self-indulgent (Day for Night, 1972) to the cloying (Small Change, 1976...
...Bresson matches the tedium of his first totally original screenplay with his renowned visual style"austere" or "minimal" to his admirers, but really just plain boring...
...This is a logical and inevitable conclusion, not merely a "final irony...
...and, above all, the quirky urbanity of the protagonist, Mathieu (Fernando Rey...
...When he does, she spurns him because he is married, so he conveniently disappears and returns, divorce in hand...
...Meszaros' movie, from a screenplay by Ildik6 Korody, J6zsef Balazs and Geza Beremenyi, is the story of two Hungarian women, Mari (Marina Vlady) and Juli (Lili Monori), living in a state-run workers' hostel...
...Unlike Duras or Bresson, he has made two undeniably great films Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and-Jules and Jim (1961...
...Although the tale of comically thwarted passion is often entertaining, it is very far from Bunuel at the peak of his form...
...Indeed, it is precisely the artistry he displayed so well in earlier films that makes his <: st offering appear so slight: From an old master, we have a right to demand more than simply a charming but .on-fused comedy...
...Right to show up...
...They are veritable earth mothers, of the sort much derided by "liberated" women, wandering around in long dresses and singing an inane little ditty, "I'm a woman-i'm me...
...In one confrontation between Mari and Janos, Juli's alcoholic husband (Jan Nowicki), Meszaros keeps the camera steadily on him, rather than cutting to her face for reactions shots...
...At least that would explain how she could also say of Agnes Var-da's third festival selection, One Sings, the Other Doesn't, that it "does for the spirit of sorority what the films of Renoir and Truffaut have done for the spirit of fraternity...
...Hopelessly in love with Conchita, an 18-year-old girl, the 50-year-old Mathieu somehow manages to maintain a bemused detachment from the series of indignities she forces him to endure...
...This Jekyll-and-Hyde device never quite convincingly captures Con-chita's mercurial nature...
...Actually, neither one is much of activist...
...When he finally dies, our one regret is that he did not take all his pals along with him...
...If Robert Bresson is the emperor without clothes, the empress is surely Marguerite Duras...
...After they separate, she suffers terribly and is eventually institutionalized...
...For all the weaknesses of the 15th New York Film Festival, the presence of Meszaros and Goretta made it a worthwhile event...
...And these hackneyed situations are regarded by both Truffaut (who did the script along with Michel Fer-maud and Suzanne Schiffman) and his cast with a seriousness that borders on the grim...
...Unlike Varda, Meszaros recognizes the enormous complexities of human relationships and confronts the demands of reality...
...For one thing, Pomme is hardly a "figure of idealized innocence" (it is simply a tribute to Goretta's pacing and the minute gradations of Huppert's emotions that she appears to be so in the first half of the film...
...As they come to know each other, their friendship slowly develops out of a common adversity: They are both suffering unhappy marriages...
...Fortunately, The Truck, her latest film and her fifth festival selection, is also her shortest (80 minutes...
...She drives people out of the theatre, while, no doubt, scorning them for their childish obtuseness...
...Mari, the elder of the two, is the resident director of the complex...
...Originally trained as a painter and ever since lauded for the composition of his shots, he is continually losing sight of the forest for the trees...
...The director has made a worse blunder in periodically punctuating Mathieu's pursuit with unpleasant and totally irrelevant-reminders of reality: sickness, death and violent acts of urban guerrillas...
...Art, of course, involves much more than aggressively alienating an audience...
...Under Meszaros' careful hand, she gives a subtle shading to the conflicting feelings of a woman torn between responsibility and need...
...Perhaps the best way to approach The Lacemaker is to begin with what it is not...
...Two incidents from Bertrand's childhood, for instance-his initiation into the mysteries of sex by a whore with a heart of gold, and the trauma of learning about his mother's sex life after reading her love letters-are supposedly the key to the autobiography he is writing during the film...
...Duras' singlemindedness in her pursuit of simplemindedness has earned the grudging respect of Pauline Kael: "There can't be much doubt that she enjoys antagonizing the audience, and there is a chicness in earning the public's hatred...
...One of the worst scenes is Bertrand's death, a clumsily staged and confusingly photographed denouement that results from his tumbling out of his hospital bed after trying to grab a nurse...

Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 22


 
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