A Festival's Moveable Feast

By JAY COCKS

UNLIKE the annual cinematic extravaganzas at Cannes and Venice, there is no competition for awards and little commerce conducted at the New York Film Festival. New York has never given a prix, and usually most of the movies--this year more than half of the 24 selections--have been booked into American theaters anyway. Thus the New York festival, now in its tenth year, is primarily a social occasion. It has become an annual two-week ritual for movie buffs to gather in the lobbies of Lincoln Center, trade gossip, champion favorite films and, inevitably, castigate the witlessness of the selection committee, whose choices, nevertheless, were both diverse enough and shrewd enough to guarantee sellout houses. Among the more notable:

A Sense of Loss starts out as a straightforward documentary appraisal of the situation in Northern Ireland. Marcel Ophuls' monumental previous film. The Sorrow and the Pity, (TIME, March 27), brought shape and great emotional resonance to the memories of citizens of Clermont-Ferrand during its occupation by the Germans in World War II. A Sense of Loss shows the same extraordinary compassion for people, the same rare gift for making political history real in immediate human terms. The dilemmas of occupied France emerge more clearly after nearly 30 years than do the problems of a divided Ireland, which still rage. But if A Sense of Loss lacks the definitive quality of The Sorrow and the Pity, it has a desperate urgency all its own. Ophuls spent a month and a half earlier this year shooting all around Ireland, his subjects ranging from Bernadette Devlin and Prime Minister Jack Lynch to the arch-conservative Protestant preacher, the Rev. Ian Paisley. Ophuls has structured the film not on these interviews, however, but around the impact of meaningless deaths. Parents mourn the incineration of their adopted son Colin, 17 months old; a widow tells how her husband, a prosperous Belfast businessman, tried to defuse a bomb that blew him apart. Ophuls ends this superb and important film with memories of a teen-age schoolgirl killed accidentally as she rode home from a dance one night in an ice-cream truck. An innocent life, a senseless death: the fury and the contradiction and the hopelessness of the whole situation come down, for Ophuls, finally to this. A Sense of Loss is the cinematic essay at its very finest. Scrupulously fair, profoundly humanistic, undetected by rhetoric and propaganda, Ophuls is the Orwell of the cinema.

Summer Soldiers concentrates mostly on the plight of a rather vacant

G.I. Jim (Keith Sykes) as he skulks round Japan, looking for help and a place to hide after he goes AWOL. He is aided by sympathetic families, a bar girl, a truck driver and, ultimately, by a counseling group that convinces him that going back to base, then turning himself in, is the best thing to do. Hiroshi Teshigahara's previous film, Woman in the Dunes, (1964), was overburdened by a kind of febrile surrealism, but it at least demonstrated energy. Summer Soldiers is slackly directed in a trumped-up documentary style. Jim is a numbingly inarticulate spokesman for war resistance; like the well-scrubbed kids on any television series, he frets a great deal about his guitar and the stagnation of his songwriting talents. If Teshigahara sees much irony in this, he keeps it to himself.

Chloe in the Afternoon brings to a close Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," a series of intricate and elegant miniatures that also includes My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee. Chloe shares with its predecessors the same severe geometry of plot, the same wry seriousness about the torturous business of the heart. The hero is a married businessman named Frederic (Bernard Verley) who lives a quiet, bookish life in a Paris suburb with his pretty pregnant wife (Francoise Verley), but he teases and tempts himself with reveries of other women. Most of the film involves his flirtation with a young vagabond called Chloe (Zouzou), which begins innocently enough, then turns threatening, ruthless, potentially destructive. The tone throughout is detached and bemused, and the actors are perfect. Rohmer's is basically a writer's cinema, however, so that his films often seem cramped and static, the camera less a tool than an instrument of record. Rohmer is concerned with building the monotony of the hero's stringent life, but the film itself suffers from repetition and a sense of claustrophobia, as if we were beginning to suffocate along with Frederic. Counterbalancing these defects are the shrewdness of Rohmer's perceptions about his characters and his understanding of the subtle undercurrents of feeling that can so easily devastate the senses. He is a wily and subtle fabulist, and Chloe has much of his keenest and most graceful work.

Two English Girls will be faintly familiar to devotees of Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1961). Both movies are based on novels by Henri-Pierre Roche, and Two English Girls shares the exhilarating romanticism with which Truffaut suffused his previous film. As in Jules and Jim, the central relationship is triangular, but this time the situation involves two women smitten with the same man. Anne (Kika Markham) and Muriel (Stacey Tendeter) are sisters enamored of Claude (Jean-Pierre Leaud), the son of their mother's closest friend, who has come from Paris to convalesce at their cliffside cottage. The passions, disappointments and intricacies of the three-sided affair span years and remain unquieted, as in Jules and Jim, even by death. Two English Girls is the more somber film of the two. The ebullience of youthful spirit in Jules and Jim has been replaced by a feeling of almost autumnal melancholy. As the girls,

Markham and Tendeter are exquisite. Leaud displays none of the unforced charm or spontaneous feeling he had as a boy in The 400 Blows. His performance here is coy, cloying and nearly ruinous. There is also something static about Truffaut's choosing to rework an old theme. Two English Girls is an agreeably lustrous movie, but it suffers from the inevitable comparison to a great one.

Wednesday's Child treats the subject of incipient schizophrenia with grim understanding. The focus of this clinical dramatization is Janice (Sandy Ratcliff), young daughter of a lower-middle-class British family, who has been more than usually bruised by the trials of adolescence. Her parents, their marriage long a stalemate of uneasily repressed hostility, commit her to the care of a therapist whose attempts to reach Janice are thwarted by his dismissal from the hospital. Wednesday's Child strains credulity here. The doctor's reasonable, low-key therapy sessions hardly seem radical enough to get him dismissed even from Bedlam. Janice, submitted to electric shock and heavy drugs, retreats ever deeper into her dark private world, until at film's end, standing lost and mute, she faces a class full of bored medical students. It is clear that Director Ken Loach (Kes) and Scenarist David Mercer (Morgan) intend their movie to be a plea for greater flexibility and experimentation in the treatment of mental disorders. Wednesday's Child is a vigorous indictment, but Loach and Mercer might have made their points even more forcefully if they had remained a little more dispassionate.

Love memorably chronicles a year in the life of a woman (Mari Torocsik) whose husband has been jailed for unspecified political crimes by the Hungarian secret police. The husband's aging mother is dying. To comfort her, the woman writes long letters, supposedly from the husband, about his fantastic adventures as a film director in America. The old woman (Lili Darvas) finally passes away without ever knowing that her son is in jail. The wife endures, and abruptly, without explanation, her husband (Ivan Darvas) is released and returns home. The moment of their reunion, impeccably acted, rendered with poignant simplicity by Hungarian Director Karoly Makk, is a scene that overwhelms by understatement. Like Love itself, it is a model of meticulous observation and flawless feeling.

Images boasts Susannah York in its central role, although her presence is nothing to brag about. She plays a wealthy writer of children's stories who is beleaguered by some decidedly grown-up fantasies, mostly having to do with her husband, a couple of former lovers, an enigmatic child (Catherine Harrison) and various manifestations of menace and death. When her husband packs her off to the countryside for a rest, the lady's predicament becomes even more woeful, as does Susannah York's performance, which gives way to a battery of twitches, groans and grimaces, interrupted by an occasional shriek of anguish. Like Director Robert Altman's previous film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Images has its own distinctive ambience -- chilly, remote and for bidding. This is owing, perhaps, to the valuable presence of Altman's two skillful collaborators, Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and Production Designer Leon Ericksen. Altman, however, is unable to go much beyond atmospherics. Substance, as ever, eludes him.

Heat, a faggot rehash of Sunset Boulevard, is about an aging, braying B-picture movie star (Sylvia Miles) who takes up with a narcissistic stud (Joe Dallesandro). The film was made by the Andy Warhol epigone Paul Morrissey, who, like his master, exploits the sorry selection of freaks who have been recruited for the cast. Thus the audience is invited to have a good laugh at the gargoyle visage of Miles, chortle over Dallesandro's near-autistic blankness, and revel in the antics of an obese motel owner, and a schizophrenic lesbian. The lazy profanity and the grungy, grim quality of Heat's ambidextrous sexuality will be familiar and predictable to Warhol addicts. What is despicable about Heat is the way it both flaunts and mocks the grotesqueries of its cast, who seem generally neither to notice nor greatly care.

. Jay Cocks

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