Quick Cuts

By F.R.

Each fall the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center serves as a 2 1/2-week primer on the state of world cinema. This year, as usual, there is a heavy emphasis on big-name European directors (Bertolucci, Bu'nuel, Pasolini, Bresson), a shortage of American movies, and a sprinkling of exotic entries from underdeveloped nations. Only a few of the festival films are immediately released elsewhere. Among them:

Short Eyes Shot at "the Tombs" house of detention in New York City, this film offers a brutally honest slice of prison life, and it is completely devoid of the mawkish hand wringing that has characterized most other American jailhouse movies. There are no bad-guy guards to hiss at, no latter-day Birdmen of Alcatraz to root for. Writer Miguel Pinero, who served five years at Sing Sing for armed robbery and is currently under indictment for other crimes, asks the audience to see his characters for exactly what they are.

The film's documentary-style depiction of the prison's multiracial social strata and daily routine is fascinating, but it is Short Eyes' title character who gives the film its thrust. "Short Eyes" is prison slang for child molester, the one kind of felon all the others deplore, and when Prisoner Clark Davis (Bruce Davison) arrives at the Tombs, the moral and emotional tensions of the cell block are brought into powerful relief. Like Eugene O'Neill's Iceman, Davis is a crackerjack theatrical device; thanks to Davison's finely shaded performance, he is also the most disturbing character in a film full of blistered souls.

The other performances are fairly good too, but Short Eyes can't always camouflage its origins as a one-set play: there are too many theatrical monologues that stop the movie dead, and there is a forced climax that is almost a parody of third act curtain scenes. Director Robert M. Young (Nothing but a Man) does, however, convey the authentic pain in Pinero's script, and it really stings.

The Man Who Loved Women is Bertrand (Charles Denner), a provincial French lab technician who guiltlessly pursues a life of one-night stands. Like so many of Franc,ois Truffaut's melancholy comedies, this film deals with the impossibility of monogamous love: Bertrand sleeps with dozens of women because he knows there is no one woman who can offer him complete fulfillment. Eventually he writes a memoir about his exploits--a Story of Adele H. in reverse, one might say--and dies happy.

The film is strewn with lyrical Truffaut conceits (including some giddy montages of women's legs), as well as a few comic seduction scenes, but it is arguably the shallowest of this great director's works. In Truffaut's best movies, such as Jules and Jim and Stolen Kisses, the heroes struggle mightily with the eternal conflicts of love, and the audience is all the wiser for living through their torment.

This time there is no struggle and no enlightenment: Bertrand is just a flip Don Juan--a stock comic figure who resolves all of life's dilemmas by retreating to adolescence. Despite Denner's amusingly self-effacing performance, it is hard to care about him or, worse still, the women he damages along his selfish way. Truffaut's vulnerability and sweet tragic sense are strangely absent here; this film is just depressing.

One Sings, the Other Doesn't is a frankly feminist film about two friends whose lives are altered by the women's move ment of the 1960s. Coming from gifted French Director Agnes Varda (Le Bon-heur), it is a surprisingly lazy and self-indulgent work. Rather than trust her char- acters to convey the film's content, the director smothers the movie with a voice-over narration that lectures the audience on the Meaning of It All. Art -- even political art as didactic as this -- is supposed to show, not tell.

If Varda had any startling insights, One Sings might be tolerable -- but this movie seems to be pitched at audiences that have never heard of feminism be fore. What one mainly carries away from the film are its pretensions: its needlessly fractionalized narrative, its Helen Reddy-level song lyrics (by Varda) and its condescending insistence on embracing all of humanity. --F.R.

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