Film
Seitz, Micheal H.
FILM Michael H. Seitz Third World Themes Few Third World films enjoy distribution in the United States, and not all those that make it are worth seeing. Some are underproduced; others apparently...
...In some respects, it resembles Man of Iron, Andrzej Wajda's semi-documentary celebration of Solidarity...
...An aspiring ballet dancer spends her days as a welder in a Pittsburgh steel mill and performs New Wave dances at night in a working-class bar...
...Alsino and the Condor, by exiled Chilean director Miguel Littin, is a co-production of Nicaragua (where it was filmed), Cuba, Mexico, and Costa Rica...
...They Don't Wear Black Tie is the most recent effort of Leon Hirszman, one of the founders of the 1960s Brazilian Cinema Novo, a movement that sought to make films dealing with significant social issues while creating a national film culture free of foreign influence...
...Though I'm generally sympathetic to the film's powerful political attitudes, I wish it expressed them more subtly...
...Writer-director Bill Forsyth {Gregory's Girl) brings to this film a rare, wry, and deliciously understated sense of humor, much like the sparkle in the best British comedies of the 1950s...
...One day he is befriended by an American military adviser (Dean Stockwell) who takes Alsino up in his heavily armed helicopter, telling him that he, too, can fly if he studies hard...
...But though Tiao refuses to become a company spy—a rewarding job—he does not want to jeopardize his dream of personal happiness by taking an active role in a chancy cause...
...Despite a number of memorable scenes, this remains a work of stunning bits and pieces that ultimately fail to cohere...
...But the most ambitious Third World filmmakers have been doing work that is worth seeking out...
...He sees executions of rebel prisoners, saturation bombings called in by the frustrated American adviser, and stiff resistance on the part of guerrillas and outraged peasants...
...Two current releases—one from Brazil, the other from Nicaragua—are visually satisfying and politically absorbing...
...After the helicopter is shot down—landing in the upper branches of Alsino's fateful tree—he takes up a rifle, smiles for the first time since he was injured, and proudly declares himself to be a rebel...
...This platitude constitutes the narrative substance of Flashdance, a farfetched melodrama that reworks formulas from Saturday Night Fever ("gotta dance") and Rocky ("gotta be someone...
...They Don't Wear Black Tie is a conventionally realized film...
...But Alsino is put off by the noise of the monstrous machine...
...he once served a three-year prison term for his activities...
...Two young lovers come out of a Sao Paulo movie theater and make their way home through a heavy downpour...
...But events at the plant take charge: Militant workers are fired, precipitating a vote for a general strike...
...The family—which now includes pregnant Maria—pulls together, and the film makes clear in strong concluding sequences that the struggle will continue...
...The American and indigenous government officers are all grotesquely depicted, and the freedom fighters are invariably flawless...
...The film opens with what appears to be the start of a rather conventional romantic idyll...
...he can do so in his dreams but forgets how when he awakes...
...Nonetheless, Miguel Littin has fashioned a strong, attractive, and unusually imaginative film...
...The film's credibility might have been strengthened by the introduction of a troubled, well-intentioned officer or a peasant who feared that revolution could merely replace one oppression with another...
...Otavio, played by Guarini, is a union organizer who has devoted his life to the struggle for social and economic democracy in Brazil...
...He proudly insists that he can take care of himself, rejects his father's counsel, and devotes himself to solving his own problems...
...Maria (Bete Mendes) asks Tiao (Carlos Alberto Ricelli) for assurances of his love, which he readily supplies...
...They Don't Wear Black Tie has won awards at Venice and other international film festivals...
...Flashdance "Ya give up yer dream . . . ya die...
...Then they enter the cramped quarters of the young man's family, waiting with further embraces for the rain to end...
...Tiao directs Maria to stay home where she'll be safe, but she refuses to be ordered about and accuses him of wanting just "a nice little wife to cook nice meals...
...So Alsino climbs to the top of a gigantic tree, spreads his arms, launches himself, and falls to the ground in a broken heap...
...others apparently cater to indigenous enthusiasm for escapist entertainment and are as mindless as much of Hollywood's product...
...She then confesses she is pregnant and insists that Tiao should feel no obligation to marry her...
...It boasts strongly held conviction, pays attention to the gritty details of working-class Brazilian life, and displays outstanding acting...
...He survives, but as a cripple thereafter known as "Hunchback...
...Besides, it is not at all what he has in mind: He wants to soar freely, like a bird...
...Actor-playwright Gianfran-cesco Guarini wrote the screenplay with Hirszman and also plays the lead role...
...Tiao leaves: Director Hirszman does not foreclose the possibility of an eventual change of heart and leaves us in doubt about the ultimate outcome of the strike...
...Maria's alcoholic father is murdered by a hysterical robber, so Tiao must take care of Maria's mother and young adopted brother...
...Tiao, already worried about assuming the burdens of fatherhood, discovers that the family for which he will shoulder responsibility is larger than he had anticipated...
...Though Otavio is concerned about his son's future, he assumes the young man shares his commitment to working-class solidarity...
...She lives in a chic warehouse loft, looks like a Vogue ad, and is ardently pursued by her handsome, considerate, and supremely eligible boss...
...La Truite (The Trout) A strong-willed peasant girl from the Jura Mountains slithers through life, just like the sleek sharp-toothed fish...
...Otavio tells him that he won't tolerate a strike breaker in his home...
...He admits he would like to be in better financial shape before they wed, but otherwise welcomes the news and hopes that they set an early wedding date...
...But the most serious obstacle is posed by an impending strike at the factory where Maria, Tiao, and his father, Otavio, all work...
...Alsino's passion is to fly...
...But instead of chronicling the rise of a workers' movement, They Don't Wear Black Tie focuses on the drama of a working-class family and the aspirations of its members...
...Wt Hits and Misses Local Hero Pure Scotch broth—a delightful and disarming contemporary fairy tale for adults...
...Based on the novel by Roger Vaillant, directed and co-written by Joseph Losey (The Servant, The Accident), and performed by a star-studded cast (Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Jeanne Moreau, Alexis Smith...
...Eschewing the niceties of character development and narrative credibility, Adrian Lyne—whose background is in television commercials—has directed this blue-collar fairy tale as though it were an anthology of advertisements for fashionable products...
...Guarini, especially, manages to make the character of Otavio both exemplary and human—and by the end of the film he begins to look remarkably like Lech Walesa...
...In a bordello, Alsino squanders money he was to bring his aged grandmother...
...Maria's passionate protests secure Otavio's release, and he returns to confront his confused but unrepentant son...
...The prospects for connubial bliss seem bright, but other obligations soon emerge to block the union...
...The locals are eager to profit from the environmentally deleterious windfall, but nothing turns out quite as planned...
...A young Houston oil executive is sent to a Scottish seaside village to buy the place up for a projected tanker port and refinery...
...Alsino and the Condor is set in the mountainous hinterlands of an unnamed Central American country and chronicles the Can-dide-like misadventures of an orphaned peasant boy, played by Alan Esquivel...
...It was nominated for an Oscar this year, but the upstanding members of the Academy were apparently unwilling to honor a film that promotes revolution and unsparingly attacks American military intervention on behalf of repressive governments...
...It is one of those rare works that successfully produce a cinematic equivalent of the "magic realist" vision in contemporary Latin American literature—a vision composed of elements of folktale, fantasy, and often brutal reality...
...At the plant gates, police and company goons attack the strikers: Maria is badly beaten, Otavio is arrested by the secret police—and Tiao, insisting on his right to work, crosses the picket line...
...But she manages to overcome such problems and knocks the judges dead at her ballet audition...
...Hungry and ashamed, he wanders the countryside, witnessing the heartless forced evacuation of villagers in rebel-infiltrated territory...
...They embrace amid nocturnal lighting reflected off slick pavements, an obviously picturesque setting...
Vol. 47 • July 1977 • No. 7
