FELLINI GO HOME!

By RICHARD CORLISS

For some foreign filmmakers, 1996 was a very good year. Hong Kong's John Woo teamed with John Travolta for Broken Arrow ($70 million at the domestic box office). Jan de Bont, who got his start shooting Dutch art films, helmed the whirlwind Twister ($242 million). Roland Emmerich, from Germany, had a little number called ID4 ($305 million). Foreign directors, America thanks you!

But for directors who work in foreign languages, America has scant appreciation. Even with spillover grosses from the 1995 Italian hit Il Postino, last year's foreign-language earnings amounted to less than 1% of the total U.S. box office. This is down from 4% to 5% in the 1960s, when foreign-language films were the intellectual rage du jour and an inspiration for smart Hollywood directors. Today, with an adventurous spirit and a full tank of gas, you might track down a small gem like Patrice Leconte's Ridicule, a period comedy with rapier wit, or Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie, a sardonic thriller about the death of the bourgeoisie with fearless star turns by Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire. Those, alas, are just tokens. Few foreign-language films are released in the U.S. these days, and those that are attract fewer customers.

"We are seeing the absolute bottom of the arc of foreign-language films playing in U.S. theaters," says Bingham Ray of October Films. "I love these films and want to support them, but it's a real uphill struggle. You feel like Sisyphus." Ray's company distributed The White Balloon, the lovely Iranian fable that the New York Film Critics judged the best foreign-language film of 1996, but which has grossed less than $1 million in its year's release.

The sad fact is that foreign-language films no longer matter. Americans, absorbed in their junk culture, are shuttering a window to the rest of the movie world.

What went wrong?

For a few answers let's flash back, like some labyrinthine Alain Resnais epic, to the glory days of foreign-language films--the '50s and '60s. Back then Hollywood was Doris Day and Jerry Lewis on the low side, Tennessee Williams and biblical spectacles on high. Meanwhile, artists in other countries were leading film to a robust maturity: Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in France, Akira Kurosawa in Japan, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy, Luis Bunuel in Spain. As each director found a constituency, U.S. distributors would pick up his earlier films, as well as other movies from the same country. Americans got an informed sampling from the world's film banquet.

The allure of foreign-language films was twofold: they had class and they had sex. Ritzy Manhattan soirees were spiced with debates about what was real and what fantasy in Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad or Fellini's 8 1/2, about Antonioni's seductive use of existential ennui. And when foreign films didn't tax the brain, they stirred the loins. In pouty Brigitte Bardot, in statuesque peasant Sophia Loren, in the knowing rapture of Jeanne Moreau, Americans saw ideals of glamour more complex than Jayne Mansfield. Even Bergman gave you bosoms along with the angst. These films were invitations to European decadence; each American became a Henry James innocent abroad, primed for education and debauchery.

Some of these films broke out of the art houses to the general audience. A Man and a Woman, I Am Curious (Yellow), Z--all were hits. Fellini's 3-hour La Dolce Vita, released in subtitled and dubbed versions, grossed the 1961 equivalent of $80 million. Part of its appeal was in the panoramic views of Roman naughtiness and Anita Ekberg's cleavage. But Fellini, along with many other directors, was experimenting with visual language. Imagine: here were new ways of seeing the world on film.

What Hollywood couldn't ignore it would try to co-opt. The year was 1967, the films Bonnie and Clyde (whose script was originally offered to Godard) and The Graduate (with its jazzy ransacking of the European film lexicon), and soon American directors had the auteur status that had been the exclusive province of foreigners. Then U.S. films got gamier, porno went legit, and the raincoat brigade didn't have to take its sex in Swedish.

If the foreign genre wasn't dead, it was missing. Some of the best directors died (Truffaut) or retired (Bergman). Others kept working, but in the U.S. their work was shown sporadically at best. The last films Fellini and Satyajit Ray made never opened here; neither have the most recent films by Godard, Resnais, Antonioni and Kurosawa. The Netherlands' Paul Verhoeven (Spetters) joined a century-long exodus of European talent to Hollywood (where he made Robocop and Showgirls). Denmark's Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) stayed in Europe but made films in English. That leaves a new generation of world masters--Greece's Theo Angelopoulos, Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien, Iran's Abbas Kiarostami--that is largely unknown to Americans. "The auteurs are there," says Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax Films. "The American marketplace is just not accepting them."

A common rap on modern world cinema is that it's way too austere. To the untutored eye, seeing Hou's Good Men, Good Women or Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees may indeed be like watching the most beautiful paint dry. But not every movie in the world has to run to the Hollywood pulse; some films can be contemplative and complex. Besides, Americans have also proved indifferent to the vital, popular film industry in India, with its delirious musical melodramas, and in Hong Kong, whose films have enough violent action to put Arnold and Sly out of business. Exoticism, artistry, hurtling pace--these movies have it all. Yet they remain the province of Indian and Chinese emigres and of the cultists who haunt downtown or mail-order video outlets. The one exception, Jackie Chan, was a huge Asian star a dozen years before his first Hong Kong film got a U.S. release.

With audiences hostile to innovation, and in the absence of franchise directors, distributors look for movies that stress heart over art. The three breakout foreign-language hits of the '90s--Cinema Paradiso and Il Postino from Italy and Like Water for Chocolate from Mexico--are nice romantic dramas about love and loss. They were brilliantly promoted by Miramax. But they didn't extend film language as Fellini's or Godard's films did; instead, they gave audiences that warm-puppy feeling. Any Disney movie can do that. So can many of the American independent films that have filled the old foreign-language slots at art houses. And you don't have to read subtitles.

Don't wanna read; don't wanna see. Bosnia and Rwanda--big yawn. The real problem is our boredom with anything outside ourselves. "More and more," says Tom Brueggemann, who books specialized fare for Loews Theatres, "Americans are obsessively and exclusively interested in American culture. Even college students now tend to like the same films everyone else likes. If they have niche tastes, it's not for Bergman and Bunuel but for Beavis and Butt-head." Intellectual connoisseurship? That was for gramps. Who wants to cram for a movie? Hey, dude: school's out forever.

O.K., dudes. Listen to Harvey Weinstein, who in a cagey or quixotic gesture will be distributing a host of foreign-language films this year. "We can't abandon these films," he says, "because if we do, there ain't gonna be no new Kurosawas, Fellinis or Truffauts. It'll all be homogenized American. And that's bad."

This news--limiting film culture to American moviemakers--is pretty bad. The good news is that there's a whole big world of movies that can challenge and exasperate and enthrall you. So pester your mall-house manager, hector the dweeb at the video-store counter, book a flight to the Toronto Film Festival. Just find a way to see what the rest of the movie world considers its precious art.

--With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York