The Thomas Crown Affair
The Thomas Crown Affair
"Fashion can be bought," said one-time Vogue Editor Edna Woolman Chase. "Style one must possess." The Thomas Crown Affair has spent millions on fashion; Faye Dunaway makes 31 smashing costume changes, while Steve McQueen appears in $350 suits and consults a $2,250 Patek Philippe watch. The screen that exhibits them is a flashy replay of Expo 67 techniques, fragmenting into scores of tiny separate images like a mint sheet of stamps, or simultaneously showing five characters in five different places.
If style could be purchased, Norman Jewison, normally a versatile, canny director (The Russians Are Coming, In the Heat of the Night), would surely have included it. Unable to do so, he has turned out a glimmering, empty film reminiscent of an haute couture model: stunning on the surface, concave and undernourished beneath.
Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is a Boston tycoon with a brilliant criminal mind. Uneasy lies the Crown that wears a head. To pique the Establishment that he is part of, he hires some crooks and stages a flawless $2,660,527.62 robbery that leaves the police without a clue. Enter Faye Dunaway, girl insurance investigator who has slept her way to the top of the business.
All pro, Faye swiftly identifies McQueen as Mr. Wrong, bird-dogs him around town, and eventually gains entree to his mansion. There ensues a ludicrously erotic chess game, out of Mae West by Tom Jones, which Faye wins. After the check comes the mating, visualized in some lurid camerawork that focuses so long on the stars' lips that they come to resemble two kissing gouramis in a tank.
Cop and robber soon fall in love; but McQueen trusts no one, and to put Faye to the test he bitterly stages another heist. She counters with an ambush that leads to a surprise ending slightly less suspenseful than the one in the Hansel and Gretel affair.
Impeded by a script that has lines like "It's my funeral; you're just along for the ride," McQueen stops acting and settles for a series of long poses. Dunaway, hired before Bonnie and Clyde was released, is used solely as a clotheshorse out for a long gambol. Giving his film a "now" look and his characters an ironic, detached air, Director Jewison obviously hoped to play his movie cool. But there are several degrees between cool and frigid: a degree of wit, a degree of plot and a degree of that old unbuyable, style. Their absence stops the movie cold.
The Man with the Balloons
When a truth grows old, it becomes a clich.e When a cliche grows old, it becomes a theme for a socially "significant" movie. In The Man with the Balloons, the cliche is man's diminution in an increasingly mechanistic society.
The man is Mario (Marcello Mastroianni), a Milanese manufacturer who is initially seen standing before one of his machines. In case anyone should miss the point, the machine is shown in furiously moving pictures; Mario is encased in a still photograph. When a salesman presents Mario with a balloon, he inflates it and suddenly becomes obsessed with the mystery of what he has done. "If I stop and there's still room inside," he muses, "then I've failed." Ignoring his friends, his mistress (Catherine Spaak) and ultimately himself, Mario gets absorbed in the nonproblem of how much air can be pumped into a balloon before it bursts.
Attempting to give his film some metaphorical importance, Director-Scenarist Marco Ferreri heavy-handedly presents the balloons as sexual, global and H-bomb symbols. To little avail. By the time Mario decides that his problem is insoluble and defenestrates himself in despair, the viewer will have long since discovered that he has been trapped inside a movie very like a balloon: filled with nothing but air and stretched to ultimate thinness.
Nazarin
Creative artists--not to mention many theologians--have long been intrigued by the thought that Jesus, if he returned to earth, might be scorned or rejected by modern Christianity. Implicitly, this is the theme of Nazarin, a Mexican film made ten years ago by Luis Bunuel;, a onetime cinema surrealist and lifelong enemy of church and state. The film is now shown in the U.S. for the first time, in the wake of his successful Belle de Jour.
A poor priest (Francisco Rabal) in turn-of-the-century Mexico is Christ-like in his purity and simplicity. Therein lies his undoing. When a local whore is pursued by the police, he hides her and is defrocked by the church for his act of charity. He gives away his raiment and walks barefoot, only to be mocked by villagers. Wherever he goes, "Nazarin"--as the villagers call him-- becomes synonymous with trouble. Finally, he shuffles off to oblivion in the custody of police.
Like Don Quixote, Nazarin is the traditional Spanish visionary-fool, who perceives what others cannot and becomes a mirror in which evil men see only themselves. But Bunuel, who has lived and worked in Mexico for more than 20 years, is no Cervantes, his portrait of the tyrannized, superstition-racked land is as primitive as the peasants themselves. The film's best moments are miniatures: the grotesque love story of a dwarf and a whore; the sudden hysterics of women keening over a dying child; a love-haunted, plague-struck woman who is offered dirisxian aid but spurns the comfort of heaven to sigh for her lost lover. The stretches between such moments are bare and boring. Moreover, Bunuei's anticlerical polemics add up to nothing more than creaky village atheism dressed in sombrero and serape.
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