Film

...He's right, and I suspect that Mad King Ludwig would be enthralled by it...

...the other three must somehow be kept in the flat and out of the pubs so that they will not see the television coverage of tanks pouring through Warsaw...

...Four Polish construction workers, posing as tourists, fly to London to renovate the flat of an opportunistic "boss" whose own expatriation is, he fears, imminent...

...One gradually comes to understand, first, that Nowak's relationship to his men mimics that of the Party and the general staff to Poland's worker masses...

...the others depend on him for everything...

...It's an uneven and disjointed work...

...Yol is the work of dissident writer-filmmaker Yilmaz Giiney, who supervised its shooting while he himself was in prison...

...In the midst of their labors, the BBC reports that General Jaruzelski has put Poland under martial law, suspended the Gdansk agreement with Solidarity, and cut off telephone communication and air travel with the outside...

...It says something about the current state of French moviemaking that the two Gallic productions shown in 1982 were both directed by foreigners...

...In turn, the relationship of Nowak to his unseen boss reproduces the bondage of the Polish leaders to their Soviet sponsors...

...solid films by two of the brightest lights of the New German Cinema, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died this year at the age of thirty-six...

...The seven festival films that will begin commercial runs by late fall are reviewed here...

...The film is a generally faithful adaptation of an S.E...

...From the outset, the bilingual foreman stands apart from his workers—apart and above...

...But Paul loses his job, and they cannot come up with the down payment on "Chez Bland...

...A story must be cooked up to explain why there will be no more calls home...

...This would be unfortunate, because Fitzcarraldo is quite a good picture (if not all that one might have hoped for), made by Herzog at the height of his powers, never mind the rumors that he'd flipped his lid...

...It embodies a comic expansiveness only hinted at in earlier works of this Bavarian visionary...

...Fearing that the news might so upset his co-workers that they would not get their work done on time, Nowak decides to keep them in the dark...

...Time Stands Still's expressionistic manner—its unrealistic lighting, use of a limited color spectrum, oblique angle shots and odd camera placement, elliptical editing—does, however, make it something of a departure...

...Lest all this sound heady and schematic, I should add that Skolimowski's antic but ultimately nightmarish work is imbued with an utterly alive sense of claustrophobia (at least half the film is photographed close up, in the flat), paranoia, and alienation...

...Fitzcarraldo Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, four years in the making, is the result of what was from all accounts one of the most harrowing, disaster-plagued, dementia-inducing productions in the history of filmmaking...

...And the dialogue is true to youthful and regional idiom...

...all that follows is colored by the failure of the revolt...

...But to seal their ignorance he must follow an increasingly manipulative course of lies and betrayals...

...Cinematically, Veronika Voss is one of Fassbinder's most stunning and assured achievements...

...Lucas's pop celebration of our bygone youth culture ignored the determining facts of life in the adult world (Bomb fears, the Cold War, McCarthyism...

...Fewer than thirty feature-length films are chosen by a committee of five predictably respected critics who are rarely in agreement (and who occasionally come up with a clinker...

...Highly selective, free of outright commercial ties, and awarding not so much as a single ribbon, it is an anomaly among festivals...

...But there are important dissimilarities, and they go well beyond obvious differences in nationality...

...Paul and Mary Bland (Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov), the film's dreamers, yearn to become suburban restaurateurs...

...In the end, though, Tex hedges its bets and gets back on the reservation...

...The film recalls certain Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s (I'm thinking especially of Sunset Boulevard and I'll Cry Tomorrow) but there is a significant difference: This is not a big-studio "weepy," but a work etched in acid...

...Nothing I could confidently call a trend suggested itself in the twenty-seven selections for festival screening...

...The film's young protagonist is cautioned, "Never speak out," and this counsel, raised to the level of a national way of life, gives rise to political dishonesty of an all-embracing sort...

...Despite the gruesomeness, it manages to keep its balance as social satire without lapsing into inane horror...

...the actual direction is credited to an assistant to whom Giiney passed on detailed instructions...

...It is as deeply felt a work as Wajda's Man of Iron...

...Unfortunately, the festival's twentieth running this fall offered few excitements in an off-year...

...To make things worse, construction foul-ups put the project over budget and off schedule...

...Hinton novel of the same name—a work that enjoys extraordinary popularity among savvy teenagers—recounting the gropings toward manhood of an appealing adolescent in Oklahoma...

...The movie has been invested with a realism quite foreign to earlier live features of Disney...

...Nonetheless, the festival has had an excellent critical record over the years, and has frequently signaled important new trends in world filmmaking...

...Moonlighting Moonlighting, a British production, is an ironic and tightly controlled political allegory—the response of exiled Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski to the imposition of martial law in his homeland in December 1981...

...To finance this wild conceit he hopes to exploit some inaccessible rubber lands inhabited by savage Jivaros Indians, achieving the impossible by hauling a large steamship over a mountain...

...He left viewers free to consider unsentimentally the nature and workings of the human order...

...By Western standards, the acting is mediocre...

...booze and drugs lead to vice and crime...

...Eating Raoul Paul Bartel's Eating Raoul, a low-budget independent feature, is an outlandish yet genial comedy, with a busy homicidal clip, cannibalism, sexual perversion and repression, and the pursuit of middle-class entrepreneurial dreams as principal fare...

...There are weaknesses in the narrative— Herzog has problems telling a story—but there are, I think, sufficient compensations in its rich and occasionally awesome imagery...

...Yeronika Yoss Veronika Voss, Fassbinder's penultimate work, completes (after The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola) a trilogy on the "economic miracle" of postwar Germany in the 1950s...

...Time Stands Still The Hungarian import, Time Stands Still, has been promoted as a sort of Magyar Graffiti...

...I would rank a few Fassbinder films higher, but I don't think that any have been realized with greater artistry...

...A means suggests itself when a lust-crazed swinger wanders from a neighboring party to the Blands', tries to rape Mary, and gets conked out by a skillet-wielding Paul...

...Throughout, the film ingeniously adopts the physical and moral point of view of the Blands...

...The jurors naturally try to cull down to the best of a given year's cinematic output, but some obvious choices elude them, and as a result are withheld by their distributors or only half-heartedly promoted...

...the Protestant work ethic will see you through the storms, sorrows, and seductions of the acne years...

...That is what happened this year to a pair of eagerly awaited films, Jean-Luc Godard's Passion and Hans Jurgen Syberberg's Parsifal...

...And the dialogue is often wooden, the result, perhaps, of poor subtitle translation...

...The "boss" has his wits about him: the Polish navvies can make ready his refuge at a fraction of the cost of hiring English laborers, while still earning in only a few months what it would take them a year to make at home...

...Eating Raoul hardly threatens the stature of Swift's Modest Proposal, but it does make for a movie that succeeds delightfully on its own terms, thanks to Barters nerviness in hewing hard to a wild premise, and running with it further than most would have dared...

...It depicts the victimization and death of the eponymous heroine (Rosel Zech), an aging but still seductive 1940s-vintage movie star now strung out on morphine and cynically exploited by a rapacious physician and social worker who cater to her addiction...

...They place a come-on ad in the Hollywood Press...

...In justification of the post-Teutonizing of the film, Herzog says it is in essence neither English nor Peruvian, but Bavarian...

...Five inmates of an "open" prison on an island in the Sea of Mormora are granted one-week leaves and, looking forward to a brief taste of freedom, traverse the Turkish interior to visit their wives, sweethearts, and families in the East...

...It retails the same conservative messages and resolute wholesomeness Disney has always promoted": teen sex is a bad idea...

...What marked this year's festival was the continued (but less strikingly innovative) productivity of filmmakers featured in the past...

...A synchronized English version was prepared, but it apparently didn't sound right...

...In detention or at large, all Turks are prisoners...

...A young sports reporter, of all people, succumbs to Veronika, and in the doing uncovers the sordidness marbling her life...

...The three laborers, for their part, turn increasingly sullen and rebellious...

...Above all there's the wondrous dream image of a ship, but a real ship, defying the laws of gravity and nature, and inching up a mountain while Caruso {La Boheme) sings in exultant accompaniment from a Victrola on the deck...

...Film and allegory rarely make a good mix, but Skolimowski (writer, director, and co-producer) succeeds by anchoring his film firmly in the mundane, and by endowing it with the feelings and knowledge of life lived as a Pole in exile, which is what he is...

...For a tight script, one can always turn to television...

...Its calamitous setbacks and the seemingly maniacal demands the director made on the cast and crew have made for good copy (see the August 1982 issue of The Progressive...

...Despite its historical subject, it is one of the most honestly contemporary of recent East European films...

...Incidentally, it is a post-dubbed German version of the film (English subtitles) that is to be released in the United States...

...Nowak (Jeremy Irons), the foreman, controls the funds and is the only English speaker of the four...

...Offering fulfillment of the kinkiest fantasies, they lure wealthy weirdos to their doom, pocket their cash, and dispose of the bodies in their apartment building's trash compactor...

...The film's bitter irony, however, is that oppression in contemporary Turkey is all-pervasive— political (directed especially against the Kurds and other ethnic minorities), cultural (as is made clear in the persistence of a brutal feudalism), sexual (the abjection of women is everywhere evident...

...he usually took pains to forestall a too facile identification with his protagonists...

...In Yol he has given us a rare and disturbing glimpse into the hard realities of life in his native land—our cherished, easternmost NATO ally...

...Fassbinder did not traffick in pathos...

...Sumptuous black and white photography evokes the period it recreates...

...French films dominated the festival's first decade, but the Parisian studios have not turned out much imposing work recently...

...FILM Yol The Turkish film Yol (it means something like "the trek of life") shared the prize for best film at this year's Cannes Festival...

...But after the military seizure of power in Poland he becomes a full-fledged political leader...

...It is as if the people at Disney wished to make hurry-up amends for the stultifying sunni-ness of earlier feature treatments of young Americans {Pollyanna, Son ofFlubber...

...Soon after the shooting, Giiney escaped and made his way to Western Europe, where he edited the film and dubbed in the dialogue...

...Tex is several notches above such recent teen hits as Porky's, but it's not going to burn up any screens...

...Location shooting in Hintonland— Tulsa and environs—gives it a gritty, documentary look...

...Whatever their content, and however critical they are of life in a socialist state, most Hungarian films seen here are cine-matically conventional, goulashes of socialist realism and classic Hollywood elements...

...No blood and gore here, no screaming victims, just ordinary Paul and Mary industriously going about the business of realizing their American dream...

...Herzog's film, in brief, is the tale of a monomaniacal opera buff (a "conquistador of the useless"), who dreams of building an opera house along the upper reaches of the Amazon and bringing Caruso to sing there...

...A prologue depicts the final moments of the 1956 Hungarian revolution...

...It is enriched by a complex and audacious sound track that exploits contemporary news broadcasts to supply a running political accompaniment to its personal drama and presses American pop music into service as counterpoint to wrenching emotional scenes...

...But this film, made under the most difficult conditions, packs a tremendous wallop...

...Not so Peter Go-thar's Time...

...Fazed but slightly, the couple find themselves in possession of the sex creep's wallet, and it occurs to them that this piece of luck needn't be a one-time thing...

...Tex Tex has been billed as the new face of Walt Disney Productions, bringing to young moviegoers reflections of their real experience and concerns...

...It is indeed, as was George Lucas's American Graffiti, a story of the yearnings and frustrations of high schoolers, set against pop songs of the period which, for these young Hungarians, also happen to be American tunes...

...strong works of a political character from Eastern Europe (three from Hungary), and persistent signs of energy, imagination, and commitment from young, independent Americans...

...The take quickly mounts, and before long they have the down payment for Chez Bland, which they hand over at a dinner whose main course is Raoul (a sort of ragout of Raoul), a smart-ass who had horned in on their act and lost out...

...This is hardly the stuff of real life, certainly not part of the routine of most teen-agers...

...So good, in fact, that the film may be eclipsed by its publicity...

...In the end, though, he is able neither to save her nor to prove the existence of the criminal conspiracy that has trapped her and others...

...The boss's limited generosity means the men must sleep on floors and eat tinned food, but the mere spectacle of well-stocked English supermarkets and periodic calls home to wives and families are temporary compensations...

...In the course of a fractured narrative, Tex (teeniebopper heart-throb Matt Dillon) tries liquor (it makes him sick) and sex (a kiss and little more), runs into barriers of class, grows up the best he can in a parent-less home under the guidance of a big brother, and, after a brief sociopathic episode, takes a first step toward independence and a sense of self-worth...

...It seemed oddly out of place in New York this year...

...But the realities of everyday life are made to give way to the extraordinary: a kidnapping at gunpoint, involvement in the murderous affairs of drug dealers, the shooting and near-death of the protagonist...

...None of the parolees escapes its crushing effects...

...Nowak cuts the food rations, stealing to make up for his deficit, and steadily lengthens the work day...