On Screen

...It lacks any redeeming esthetic, moral or intellectual value...

...yet the older woman actually rushes to her defense at the criticism and self-criticism session, telling the authorities not to heed Vera's confession of love, since she must be suffering from a "typical bourgeois fantasy" about Istvan...

...he exclaims...

...she asks...

...Masturbate him, of course...

...A typical scene ha...

...Later, after he rejects her generous offer to introduce him to more intimate pleasures, she reveals the true story behind all this family funny business: Joe's real father was not Douglas but someone named Giuseppe (Tomas Milian), whom we saw briefly in the pre-credit sequence...

...Later, Caterina and we discover that Joe is really a crazy, mixed-up kid...

...During a workers' meeting at her hospital, she defiantly complains that the revolution has not put an end to the unsanitary conditions responsible for the spread of infection in her ward...

...But that old moon starts to haunt him...

...In a flash, Douglas conveniently drops dead (presumably of a heart attack), so Joe can accompany his Mom after all...

...Bertolucci, who directed and also wrote the screenplay with Franco Ar-calli and Giuseppe Bertolucci, his brother, seems to have begun not with a story but merely with the idea of incest and the symbolism of the title...

...Clayburgh uses her rubbery Minnie Mouse face effectively, and she and Reynolds work as well togther in Starting Over as they did in Semi-Tough...

...Another is Maria (Eva Szabo), whose personal non-conformism strangely complements rather than contradicts her fierce loyalty to the Party...

...One expects, for instance, that the pragmatic Anna will denounce Vera...

...She also begins to make friends...

...In welcome contrast to the pretentiousness of Luna and the falseness of Starting Over h Angi Vera, a Hungarian movie first shown at the Festival that is about to be released commercially...

...Unable to satisfy her son's needs, what's a mother to do...

...Throughout, James Brooks' dialogue expresses all the awkwardness and hesitation of men and women who find that the single life is often very far from swinging...

...The Hungarian director's characters are not in the service of spacey ideas and arbitrary symbolism...

...as they ride comfortably in a car across the bleak winter landscape, they pass Maria, the loyal rebel, who is bravely pedaling a bicycle on her way to spread the truth of the Party to her countrymen...

...In Rome, where Caterina is performing and renting an enormous villa, he meets a nice Italian girl who is eager to initiate relations...

...The first time Phil goes out with a woman after his separation, he clumsily confesses to her, "This is the first date I've had in eight years...

...In the book, Phil's first date also attacks him out of a long-unsatisfied need, but their lovemaking comes to a pathetic end: Her young son interrupts them while they are locked in a nude embrace on her living room couch, and their shared humiliation ruins the evening for them...

...Similarly, in the movie, Phil and Marilyn finally decide to get married after their up-and-down romance...

...In the novel, the two team up not as lovers but as slightly battered comrades-in-arms, who use each other for "mutual aid and comfort" in the hostile world of swinging singles (and he eventually marries someone else...

...And then there is Ist-van (Tamas Dunai), the vaguely troubled, humanistic and married teacher Vera comes to love...

...Apparently Brooks, who was responsible for the Mary Tyler Moore Show, couldn't shake the blank, formulaic style of TV writing...

...JL.n a shattering climax, during a "criticism and self-criticism" session, Vera confesses and then repudiates her love for Istvan: "I lost my head," she says...

...No one ever accused Bertolucci of subtlety...

...Then they visit a coffee house for liquers and cream cakes...

...Throughout, too, Reynolds confirms my judgment that he is this generation's premier leading man of light comedies, an ironically macho Cary Grant...

...Vera joins the Party, and at first her zeal springs less from ideology than from a youthful idealism that is at times indistinguishable from naive good will...

...What with losing his father and being forced to go to school in a foreign country and not having any close friends besides Mom, who is always off singing somewhere, he has developed a two-fix-a-day heroin habit...

...Then the movie proper begins, with Joe (Mathew Barry), now 14-going-on-15, complaining about not being taken along on the Italian tour planned by Caterina and her husband/manager Douglas (Fred Gwynne...

...I only loved his authority...

...The credit sequence features an assortment of lunar shots in the background, as Caterina and her one-year-old son, Joe, bicycle along the Italian seaside...

...Directed and written by Pal Gabor, from a novel by Endre Veszi, Angi Vera is that rarity in today's cinema: a genuine modern tragedy...

...Luna is stupidly written, clumsily directed, hysterically acted...

...Unfortunately, despite the sharpness of his dialogue, Brooks' adaptation lapses into the kind of slickness and sentimentality that the novel adroitly skirted...

...Joe asks why he can't go instead of his father: "I can do everything Dad does —but I can do it better...

...Yet soon after she begins her training at the Party school, she becomes aware of the complex and shifting official doctrines and the grubby realities of internecine power struggles...

...The real horror comes when we realize that she believes what she is saying...

...Bertolucci, who professes to be a Communist, could learn something from Gabor's appreciation of the complicated dialectics of human behavior...

...For example, in the film, Phil's first night out as a single ends with a blackout sketch...

...after noting that the manual laborers attending the school "vanish to the inns" in the neighborhood rather than frequenting the coffee house...

...The nature of Vera's choice—between the claims of love and the harsh claims of the Party—and the destruction of her own humanity not merely by a coercive state but by her own collusion in the process of intimidation, make for real tragedy...

...Naturally, Caterina feels terribly guilty and tries to help...

...She plays Marilyn Holmberg, a recently divorced woman who falls in love with Phil Potter (Burt Reynolds), a recently divorced man who is still somewhat in love with his ex-wife, Jessica (Candice Bergen...

...His specialties are the put-upon grimace that slides into a half-hearted grin, the skeptically cocked eyebrow, and the smile that freezes halfway through when he realizes that he is being had...

...When she buys him some dope but forgets the needles, he punctures his vein with a fork in a paroxysm of frustration...

...Gabor thereby indicates in one brief sequence the persistence of class differences, the hypocritical purity of informants, and the guilty self-indulgence and self-right-eousness that result from unreasoning loyalty...

...This odd triangle gives rise to a few truly amusing situations...

...they are human beings in all their messy complexity...

...Did Bertolucci stage this whole episode just so Caterina could suck the blood out of Joe's wound as he lies there writhing and sweating...

...The year is 1948, just after the Communist Party has taken control of Hungary...

...In an equally devastating denouement, after she wins a prize for overcoming her "illusory emotions" and secures a much-coveted job as a journalist, she leaves the school with Anna...

...Having thus retrospectively imparted an arbitrary significance to that meaningless opening sequence, and having advanced the dubious notion that the incestuous impulse is passed on from father to son (or from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law), Bertolucci sweeps us toward the Big Climax in which mother, son and father are reunited—yes, by the light of the silvery moon...

...Clayburgh is featured to better advantage in Starting Over, a loose adaptation of Dan Wakefield's novel of the same title, directed by Alan J. Pakula...

...In Angi Vera, however, there is none of the determinism typical of that genre...

...Giuseppe now lives along the seaside with his mother, whom he chose over Caterina many years before...

...One is Anna (Erzsi Pasztor), a veteran of doctrinal disputes who has survived by a cunning mixture of commitment and accommodation...

...Vera (Veronika Papp) is an 18-year-old assistant nurse whose father and mother were killed in World War II...

...we see his date (Mary Kay Place) attack him just before the doors to the elevator in her building close...

...Instead, the characters all exhibit an authentic plasticity and freedom of will...

...Accordingly, one can only suppose that Bertolucci is working out some kind of sick impulse, and one wishes that he had done so privately...

...Eastern European films are often burdened with "social realism...

...Vera learning from Anna how to be an informer: While canvassing for the elections, the two discover a "Right-wing Social Democrat" and denounce him to the Party...

...Surprisingly, the Party rewards her defiance, for it is eager to recruit spirited agitators like Vera who will help root out the "reactionary forces" in the hospitals...

...Where is this new world...

...Bergen, for her part, displays an unexpected comic flair, although it is sometimes difficult to tell when her character is meant to be funny and when she is simply being made fun of...

...I must go," he tells her, apparently not in the least puzzled that the establishment would expose its patrons to moonlight in the middle of a movie...

...Just as he is about to take advantage of her willingness in a movie theater, however, the doors of a skylight open up—and guess what shines through...

...Anna asks, "We deserve this, don't we...

...both are relentlessly developed in the most literal-minded and mechanical fashion...

...This authenticiy of the characterizations results in large part from Gabor's careful attention to small, revealing details...

...Everything is the same as it was...

...It is the nonconformist Maria who disapproves of Vera's affair...

...On Screen LOVE TANGLES BY ROBERT ASAHINA r you can accept Jill Clayburgh as a famous American soprano named Caterina Silveri, you probably can accept everything else about Bernardo Bertolucci's Luna, which made its debut at the New York Film Festival...

...If, on the other hand, the spectacle of Maria Callas' voice erupting out of Clayburgh strikes you as slightly ridiculous, you will have a hard time swallowing all the other absurdities of the film...