Shades of Gray

British Director John Boorman is a film maker of stylistic skill and visual flare. He transformed a more or less routine police thriller into Point Blank, a free-for-all exercise in cinematic pyrotechnics. His Hell in the Pacific was a stunningly filmed but intellectually shallow allegory about man's inhumanity to man. His new film, Leo the Last, appears to have been made with a greater degree of directorial freedom than he has ever had; he even shares screen credit for the script. The result is a stunning but simplistic political parable that might have benefited from the literary intervention of a wiser head.

The scenario is a combination of Harold Pinter and introductory civics. Leo (Marcello Mastroianni) is the son of a deceased diplomat who arrives in London to live in his father's former residence, an opulent mansion surrounded by slums. The neighborhood teems and festers while Leo laments his own lethargy. "I can't get involved," he moans, "what can I do?" He passes most of his days pressed against an upstairs window, telescope to his eye, watching the human comedy unfold in the shops and tenement windows across the way. When he is not peeping, he is halfheartedly fighting off the advances of a maneater named Margaret (Billie Whitelaw) and trying to avoid the intricate political machinations of some of his father's henchmen.

Eventually, political involvement becomes the only way out. Improbably but gloriously, Leo discovers himself out on the street leading the entire neighborhood in a guerrilla action against his own house. The people survive, but the house does not. "Well," says a neighbor, "you didn't change the world, did you?" "No," Leo replies with wistful optimism, "but we changed our street.' That single exchange is a pretty good indication of Leo the Last's shortcomings. The movie does not so much compress serious social problems as belittle them, then finally resolve them with a whimsical and faintly maudlin flourish.

Although the film is weak at its base, its superstructure is dazzlingly handsome. There are satiric scenes that for wit and impact are unmatched since Richard Lester's Petulia. One group-therapy session in a swimming pool, for example, does expertly in a fleeting interlude of screen time what the first minutes of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice tried and failed to achieve. Leo and Margaret are jumping nude up and down in a swimming pool, surrounded by dozens of other patients, all under the supervision of a benign instructor, who keeps chanting, "Reach out, stretch out, feel the water. How do you feel?" "I feel wonderful," gushes one flabby matron. "I feel liberated," says another. Says Leo: "I feel embarrassed."

Photographed in shades of gray by a brilliant cinematographer named Peter Suschitzky, Leo the Last has an ominous, slightly oppressive quality that successfully stresses its mordant humor. The actors are first-rate, especially Billie Whitelaw and a stunning black actress named Glenna Forster-Jones. Mastroianni, who has been biding his time in indifferent roles for the past couple of years, gives a performance that proves he is still one of the world's best film actors. His English may be a trifle halting, but his elegant talent has seldom been turned to better advantage. Boorman's, however, has. Leo the Last is a riveting, passionate but inconsistent film demonstrating that John Boorman, despite his talent, still needs a bit of help.

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