Modest Fame

Film-festival movies are like mistresses in a man's life: the later they come along, the more they have to do to please, or even be remembered. Judged from this jaundiced point of view, a few films of the second segment of the seventh New York Film Festival still achieved a modest fame.

Jean-Luc Godard would certainly resent the comparison, but he makes movies the way some manufacturers make washing machines--with planned obsolescence. Only a few years after their release, Godard films become museum pieces. His innovations are adopted by other film makers, who (like Haskell Wexler in the kinetic Medium Cool) either put his techniques to better dramatic use or (like Agnes Varda in the festival's ludicrous Lions Love) sink beneath the weight of aimless stylistic decoration. Le Go/ Savoir features Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto sitting around a TV studio engaging in a lot of Mickey Mouse debate about linguistics and mouthing doses of Godard's peculiar politics (the FBI had Bobby Kennedy shot) and aesthetics (Leaud shows striking workers two truly revolutionary films: Lola Monies and The Great Dictator). It may all be dreary now, but in ten years Savoir will have a certain faint curiosity value--kind of like a 1936 Easy washer with wringer.

If a single film could justify the entire film festival, then this year that film is certainly Ermanno Olmi's One Fine Day. It harks back in some ways to the tradition of postwar Italian realism and its masters, among them Rossellini and De Sica. Yet Olmi's films seem more precise, more tightly constructed, more acute. He has a film maker's sense of composition and a novelist's sense of rhythm and construction. The plot of One Fine Day is much like an anecdote by Chekhov. A middle-aged Milanese advertising executive (Brunette Del Vita) has led a smug and comfortable life of reasonable success with his job, with his family and his women. Two intimations of death destroy this placid equilibrium: a colleague is stricken with a heart attack at a staff meeting and the executive himself accidently runs over a construction worker. The colleague recovers, and the executive is apparently acquitted of the manslaughter charge, but everything has been changed forever. The last scene finds him huddled at home with his wife one night in front of the television set, staring at the screen, with impending doom etched into his face. This is one of those rare films in which all the elements work together. The performances seem the very stuff of reality, the color photography is beautiful without being demonstrative, and the music is both functional and original. Olmi's artistry is obtrusive, but always at the service of his material. On the basis of One Fine Day and two earlier films, The Fiances and The Sound of Trumpets, Olmi must be considered a new and worthy master of the humanist cinema.

Ma Nuit Cnez Maud is a cool, deliberate, intellectual little comedy that makes an ideal festival film. The third segment of what Director Eric Rohmer calls his Six Moral Tales, Maud involves a 34-year-old engineer named Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) whose loneliness is only reinforced by an abiding sense of his own stringent Roman Catholicism. An evening with Maud, a ravishing divorcee (Franc,oise Fabian), turns into a kind of two-way ethics seminar in the bedroom, with Maud patiently listening to the engineer expound his views while slyly--but unsuccessfully--trying to coax him into bed. Jean-Louis eventually marries a vulnerable young blonde (Marie-Christine Barrault), but a chance seaside encounter with Maud a few years later discloses that it was Jean-Louis's wife who had broken up Maud's marriage. The circle is closed--and Jean-Louis finds himself trapped inside. The film is executed with a mathematical certainty that (despite the seemingly interminable scene in Maud's bedroom) makes it a dry but constant pleasure. The meticulous acting of the small cast might fairly stand as a study model for light comedy.

A ghost haunts Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War. Memories of Joan Littlewood's acerbic and exhilarating vaudeville rendering of World War I--surely one of the great theatrical events of the decade--hang heavy over this sincere but lumbering film. Littlewood used the English music hall as a metaphor for the madness of the whole war. Attenborough transfers this basically theatrical conceit to an amusement pier at Brighton and loses much of the kinetic anger of the stage original in transit. Lacking any real order, the film wanders like some shell-shocked veteran from period songs to blackout sketches to satiric historical recreations; it never once comes together into any sort of consistent or even coherent rhythm. Still, there are compensations. The large cast (including Ralph Richardson, Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Michael Corin and Vanessa Redgrave) is uniformly excellent, and the cinematography (by Gerry Turpin) is lavish and handsome. Even the music, which alternates between the naive but savage jingoism of the home front and the bemused bitterness of the trenches, strikes precisely the right note of historical irony. Despite its few scenes of splendid, subtle savagery (like John Mills, as Sir Douglas Haig, praying for victory "before the Americans arrive"), Oh! What a Lovely War too often becomes bogged down in its own dogged sincerity and finally becomes mired, like some promising but unwieldy fieldpiece, in the Marne's mud.

It seems, initially, an unlikely subject for the director of Elvira Madigan, that pastel paradigm of abject romanticism. In the late summer of 1931, in the Swedish factory town of Adalen, four workers and a girl were killed in a march to protest governmental indifference during a long and bitter wage strike. The immediate impact of the event was violent, tragic, indecisive. But the shock waves set off by that one bloody clash ultimately toppled the government and brought a whole new regime to power. Bo Widerberg perceives not only the obvious political and historical implications in the event, but, even more strongly, the intimate, personal histories that it altered and destroyed.

Adalen '31 is most deeply about the ineffable, invaluable quality of a single moment in the life of man, when a casual encounter or a supper at twilight is enclosed and enriched by the imminence of violent tragedy. Such scenes are framed in the shimmering light of a Swedish summer and seem idyllic, almost unworldly; but Widerberg handles the chaotic confrontation scene between workers and army troopers with a precise sense of brutality that proves that he is not entirely a romantic. The very gentleness and simplicity of much of the visual imagery--the names of Renoir and Monet are constantly and rightly invoked in the dialogue--acts as counterpoint to the violence even as they deepen the sense of a past gone forever. There is a certain sentimentality involved in this kind of approach that prevents Adalen '31 from being the kind of great political document that The Battle of Algiers was. As a poignant portrait of people caught in the flux of history, however, it has seldom been surpassed.

"An empty garden," announces the narrator somewhat superfluously as the camera pans slowly around an empty garden. "It is perhaps a hotel. It is a cold summer. Perhaps everyone is resting." Everything, in other words, is equivocal. The only certainty is that Destroy, She Said is a perfect cinema parody of the maddening affectations of the French anti-novelists. During vacation week at a hotel (no, not Marienbad) in the middle of a forest, Professor Henri Garcin is seduced by another woman (Catherine Sellers) as his young wife (Nicole Hiss) looks vacantly into the camera and does a lot of wondering about illusion and reality. She is consoled by a writer (Michel Lonsdale) who talks a lot about being Jewish (no, not Philip Roth). Nothing happens, but that, of course, is the order of things.

If one can overlook the fact that Destroy, She Said is mummifyingly boring, it is actually quite a lot of fun. Marguerite Duras, who executed this excellent satire, has good credentials for the job. Besides writing the screenplays for Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Une Aussi Longue Absence she also attended the birth of the anti-novel movement, making such notable contributions to the genre as Moderato Cantabile and The Sea Wall. In her directorial debut, she has unfortunately committed one rather crucial error. She seems to have been the only one who didn't get her own joke.

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