Festival Days in New York

By JAY COCKS

The New York Film Festival, held every year at Lincoln Center, continues to be the most prestigious and, not incidentally, the best of the half a dozen or so U.S. film festivals. In its eleventh year, the festival has settled into a definite personality: it is everyone's slightly eccentric, goodhearted aunt, the one who grooms herself in the arts and stages soirees that are unavoidable, a little silly but almost always pleasant.

As usual, this year's screenings--which concluded last week after a marathon 16 days--introduced a worthy film or two, surveyed what is currently interesting or chic on the Continent, and provided a temporary home for the outcasts. Best received were Truffaut's Day for Night (TIME, Oct. 15) and an American movie, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. The home team, indeed, was well represented this year by Mean Streets, Terrence Malick's Badlands (both to be reviewed separately when they are generally released) and James Frawley's Kid Blue, a funny, anarchic western released unsuccessfully last spring (TIME, May 14). Some notes on the other selections:

A DOLL'S HOUSE. Joseph Losey's version of the Ibsen classic is frosty and severe, embellished with several clumsy contemporary asides about the injustices heaped on women. It has the vigor and passion of commitment, however, and the cast is superb. Trevor Howard's Dr. Rank is gruffly tender; Delphine Seyrig's Kristine, a woman of tentative but dependable dignity; and Edward Fox's Krogstad, a figure of understandable desperation. David Warner makes Torvald into a complex, insidious but always human figure. It is a performance of the foremost skill and intelligence, and includes a quick moment--when, with meticulous condescension, he mimics Nora sewing--that is worth a gross of pamphlets and essays on sexism.

Jane Fonda represents the film's firmest break with tradition: a strong, defiantly contemporary Nora. Hers is not a thoroughly shaded interpretation --it is a little too direct and aggressive 73151;but it is a great deal more interesting and closer to the mark than Claire Bloom's airy Nora, a stage performance recently translated to film (TIME, June 18). One thing Fonda manages well is the delicate transition behind the closed bedroom door. As in the play, we do not see Nora change, but when Fonda comes out again to confront Torvald and prepare to leave, the viewer feels he can calibrate the painful inches by which the decision has been reached. Her fire and intelligence cause all the melodrama in the moment to fall aside and reveal a hard truth.

JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL is Director Claude Chabrol's cunningly engineered fable about a man (Michel Bouquet) who strangles his mistress and is slowly enveloped by guilt. He blurts out a confession to his wife, who understands; he tells his best friend, who is similarly sympathetic. The fact that his friend was also his mistress's husband only adds a little piquancy to the situation. Awash in forgiveness, the hapless killer has only one logical object for his mounting horror and self-loathing. His home, all glass and chrome and odd, abrupt angles, makes a suitably antiseptic moral landscape for the film, which is implacably smooth and elegant in the telling. Among Chabrol's finest work.

REJEANNE PADOVANI comes on strong as political allegory of an especially glum and trite variety. Denys Arcand, the director and co-writer, made the film (in French) in Toronto. It is all about corruption behind the construction of a local auto route and other matters of intractably insular interest.

HISTORY LESSONS, by contrast, at least has the virtue of audacity. This new work by West Germany's Jean-Marie Straub (Chronicle of Anna Magdalene Bach) has an explicit rhythm, fractured and languorous but slightly bizarre. History Lessons was adapted from Brecht's The Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar. It opens with a sequence showing the view from behind the windshield of a car being driven through the back streets of Rome. The scene continues for approximately ten minutes. Then Straub cuts to a man in a toga discussing Caesar's personal and political history. Then back to the camera in the car for another long interlude. Things proceed like this for 87 minutes, which tries the patience and exhausts the eye. Whatever Straub was trying to establish about the continuity of ancient and modern history and the persistent threat of dictatorship remains largely academic.

LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS is a sort of exercise in perverse anthropology by Werner Herzog, who, like Straub, is a representative of the avant-garde in the West German cinema and, again like Straub, is supported by the New York Film Festival as a sort of glorified charity case. Land is a documentary about a 56-year-old deaf and bund woman named Fini Straubinger. Herzog tracks Frau Straubinger as she tours homes and hospitals of the similarly afflicted, instructing, encouraging, dispensing small packets of courage and dignity. There is a great deal of tenderness in Frau Straubinger, but what seems to interest Herzog is the countless weird visual possibilities the handicapped offer. Their halting gestures, their grimaces, even their pain and embarrassment are all turned into a kind of absurdist visual ballet. Herzog dwells on them with an unmoved curiosity that has the chill of clinical condescension.

ANDREI RUBLEV, a stiffly statuesque exercise in Soviet formalism, concerns the 15th century icon painter and his reaction to the violence and horror of medieval Russia. The film festival program notes teasingly promised "naked pagan rites," which turn out to be a group skinny-dipping and a near-naked girl jumping on and off a ladder. The movie makes several stabs at intimate spectacle, and at dealing with the situation of the artist caught in social chaos. Director Andrei Tarkovsky is ambitious but too literal; the movie has the decorum and approximately the same depth as Dr. Zhivago.

ILLUMINATIONS. There are certain preconceptions one almost inevitably has about a new Polish film: it will be grimly absurdist; it will root about in various existential cul-de-sacs; it will end on a point of pale irresolution. Not only does Illuminations confound each of these notions; it almost entirely reverses them. A radiant film, it sifts through doubt and pain to make, finally, a statement of triumphant humanism.

Director-Scenarist Krzysztof Zanussi renews his well-worn theme--the search for direction and identity--through a superbly tempered style and sheer force of feeling. His hero (Stanislaw Latallo) is a student of science who is baffled and intimidated by the intricacies of the natural order, stalled by doubt and fear of the mysteries that not only surround him but drive him.

Illuminations is not about answers but about learning to live without answers. Zanussi neatly and effectively gets across his hero's sense of total frustration and helplessness by engulfing us, documentary style, with the kind of data that so boggle him: scientific theories, religious orders, social patterns. With all this, though, Illuminations never becomes academic or detached. It is a difficult film, but not a dense one, precisely the sort of rich discovery that in itself could justify the whole film festival.

ISRAEL WHY is a three-hour-plus French documentary that explains very little but testifies to Director Claude Lanzmann's feeling of deep kinship with the country. Lanzmann is not, like Marcel Ophuls, a film essayist of strong and disturbing insight, and he is not an especially acute documentarian either. He has caught some moments of warmth, others of search and irresolution and precipitate fulfillment, but the question posed in the title remains unanswered.

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT. A morose lesbian paces her apartment, suffering the inconstancy of her lover. Since she is a fashion designer by profession, there are a number of mannequins in the apartment, and it is the inspiration of Director-Writer R.W. Fassbinder to have his heroine come to look more and more like one of her dummies. The Platters, the Walker Broth ers and Giuseppe Verdi furnish the music, the art director furnishes the flat--outside of which the movie never strays--and Fassbinder furnishes still another reason why West German movies are regarded with as much fond anticipation as major surgery.

DISTANT THUNDER. Satyajit Ray's movies all have the shimmering, unhurried feeling of a long, waning afternoon. This one, about the early years of World War II in Bengal and the beginnings of the 1943 famine, shows the grace and calm authority of his best work, as well as his ability to shape great themes into h man drama without reducing them. Ray flirts with melodrama here, but Distant Thunder gathers a quiet force that makes most objections incidental. Better even than its treatment of the reality of poverty is the way Ray handles the subtle shifts it causes in his two main characters, a husband and wife of the Brahman caste. Their gradual and shocked awareness of the unifying desperation of tragedy gives Distant Thunder a piercing social immediacy.

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE has been picked up for theatrical distribution in the U.S. That may be somewhat surprising, in view of its intimidating length (more than 3 1/2 hours) and rigidly intimate scope: mostly three characters, a young man (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a young girl (Franchise Lebrun) and an older woman (Bernadette Lafont), toying with one another, taunting and seducing one another, finally vanquishing one another. The movie is direct and relentless, full of tough insight about the rites of what sometimes passes for love, and fierce in its final impact. Director Jean Eustache wrote the painstakingly accurate script and followed it exactly, though the movie has the flow and spontaneous immediacy of improvisation. Altogether, not a film to rouse a distributor's curiosity, but its impact can not easily be missed or forgotten by any one. A bold, unsparing and valuable work. . Jay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.