A Festival of Diamonds and Zircons

THE New York Film Festival isn't what it used to be. Perhaps it never was. True, previous festivals did provide American debuts for some major foreign films: Poland's Knife in the Water (1963), Czechoslovakia's The Shop on Main Street (1965), Italy's The Battle of Algiers (1967). But movie enthusiasts tend to forget the undistinguished and unmemorable fare that made up the bulk of the programs. Even at its best, Lincoln Center offered the viewer only a few diamonds in a setting of zircons.

The 1968 festival may contain more costume jewelry than ever before. This year's program list is more notable for its absentees than for those in attendance: there are no British, Canadian or Oriental films. On the other hand, France is lopsidedly represented by twelve movies--half of the full-length features. The lack of balance may not be entirely the festival's fault. Some films were unavailable for screening: Hollywood, as usual, refused to provide any of its major productions; and Jacques Tali's new comedy, Playtime, is on 70-mm. film, too large for Lincoln Center's projectors. Several works by major directors--notably Francois Truffaut's Stolen Kisses and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus--were judged unfit.

Just how much more unfit than some of the items accepted by the festival is difficult to imagine. Closely Watched Trains, by Jiri Menzel of Czechoslovakia, won an Oscar as the Best Foreign Film of 1967. This year Menzel returns with Capricious Summer, a disappointingly slight fable about a traveling carnival in a small country town. There are three films from what the festival labels "the German Renaissance"; two of them suggest that it might have been better advertised as "the Return of the Visigoths." The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is a paralyzed semidocumentary in which the Top 20 Bach hits are rendered by some bewigged court musicians. Signs of Life, an Antonioniesque account of the Wehrmacht in Greece in 1944, belies its title.

Still, the festival has always performed a valuable service in offering certain films that were either too flawed or too offbeat for commercial distribution. The program directors' taste in revivals remains impeccable. Jean Renoir's Toni, made in 1934, is a gentle, loving tribute to the peasants of pre-Civil War Spain. The uncut version of Max Ophuls' Lola Montes (1955), never commercially released in the U.S., is one of the most sumptuous romances ever filmed. Among the other festival highlights:

Faces, one of the two full-length American features in the festival, may be the most impressive of the lot. This is Actor John Cassavetes' second effort as both writer and director. He spent six months shooting the film--mostly in his own Los Angeles house--and almost three years editing it. The result is a 130-minute study of human pain, shame, cruelty and crudity of such abrasive intensity that it constitutes more of an experience than a show.

The story is of a miserable, middle-class marriage in the process of breaking up. It is told in long scenes of indecent emotional exposure involving middle-aged businessmen, silly, frustrated wives, a good-natured call girl and a footloose young male hustler. All of them are compelled to pretend to one another and to themselves that they are having a good time. A good time is "having a lot of laughs," and their laughter--inane, drunken, forced--explodes and cackles frantically throughout the film. They feed one another stupid jokes, lies and childish games to keep the laughter coming. When it cracks, the bewilderment and despair leak out into the room and turn the laughers sick, self-pitying or snarling.

The performers are generally outstanding, especially Gena Rowlands as the call girl, John Marley as the husband and Lynn Carlin as the forlorn and suicidal wife (it is her first professional role). Cassavetes' hand-held cameras move from closeup to unsparing closeup with the agility of a spectator's shifting eye--a spectator, moreover, who must constantly feel that he is committing an invasion of privacy. It is to the film's credit that Faces evokes a slight sense of guilt: the viewer keeps watching, even when he ought to avert his eyes.

Though The Immortal Story is a French production, it, too, boasts an American director, the prodigious Orson Welles, adapting an Isak Dinesen anecdote. The works of the Scandinavian taleteller resemble rows of icicles, gelid, brittle and pure. To bend them is to break them; to lend them warmth is to make them lose their integrity. Even Welles has been unable to fashion more than a laborious, misshapen exercise. The reasons are obvious. This is his first film in color--an inappropriate mode for a fiction written in etched, formal prose, devoid of the sensual palette. Secondly, because the movie was made for television, its time is arbitrarily restricted to an hour--too protracted for spare storytelling and too limited for character development. The most grievous flaw is the choice of the story itself.

A senile Macao millionaire, played by Welles, is a man in love with numbers and facts. He decides to play God by breathing literal life into a traditional sailors' tale--the one about an impotent rich man who hires a seaman to impregnate his young wife. The millionaire flags down a 17-year-old seaman and an aging girl-about-town (Jeanne Moreau) and puts them in his sumptuous bedchamber. The sailor, he cackles, will one day tell the story of his exploit--and for the first time in history, that yarn will be founded on truth.

Irony comes with the first rays of morning: the tale will never be told, either by the dumb-struck youth or by the dead millionaire. Chilly splinters of the Dinesen style occasionally gleam in the stilted drama. But recurrent lines, like "The earth trembled at the loss of my innocence," are difficult enough on paper; on film they are impossible.

This year Lincoln Center offers not one but three productions of France's protean Jean-Luc Godard. Weekend is a bloody attack on bourgeois society; One Plus One, his first film in English, stars the Rolling Stones and was just finished when the festival began. Two or Three Things I Know About Her is Godard as sociologist--cool, clinical, though concerned. Fortunately, he is a better moviemaker than sociologist, and his rather trite treatise on the depersonalizing effects of modern life is a visual joy.

The "Her" of the title is Paris--a city that Godard sees as being made over by machines into a vast machine for living. Huge cranes swing in the sky; compressed-air drills roar and scream on the sound track as they erect enormous complexes of apartments. And in their symmetrical little flats, surrounded by their new furniture, kitchen appliances and brightly packaged brand-name products, families are going into debt. To raise extra money, one man rents his bedrooms to couples by the hour. A young housewife named Juliette (Marina Vlady) resorts to part-time prostitution.

Godard follows Juliette through a typical day. She visits a dress shop, a bar, a hairdresser. She and a friend pose for an American photographer just back from Viet Nam. She takes a young worker to a cheap hotel. Back at the flat with her two children, she has a conversation with her husband, a garage mechanic, that sums up Godard's dim view.

"Well, here at last," says Robert (Roger Montsoret). "Where?" asks Juliette.

Robert: "Home." Juliette: "And then what, what are we going to do?" Robert: "Sleep . . . what's got into you?"

Juliette: "And then what?" Robert:

"We'll get up." Juliette: "And then what?" Robert: "The same thing. We'll start all over again. We'll wake up, work, eat." Juliette: "And then what?"

Robert: "I don't know . . . die."

Typically, Godard has tricked up this thin little life-slice with experimental techniques that are no longer experimental: his own voice whispering a commentary, monologues in which the actors face the camera and talk about themselves. Still, he has framed the colors and sounds of Juliette's tawdry day with such sharpness and immediacy that life--even on these terms--seems like a pretty exciting adventure.

La Religieuse, another French entry, is an austere, furious re-creation by director Jacques Rivette (Paris Belongs to Us) of Denis Diderot's scandalous 18th century novel, which displayed French convents rife with hypocrisy and licentiousness. Suzanne (Anna Karina), the illegitimate daughter of a bourgeois, finds herself in her teens without husband or money. Pushed into a convent by her parents, she can do nothing but vainly petition lawyers to extricate her from a spiritual prison. In one nunnery, flagellation is a substitute for revelation; in another, lesbianism is the order of the Order. In the end, she leaps to death, and thus freedom.

Rivette follows the savage original with scrupulous fidelity, which explains why Roman Catholic authorities were able to ban the film in France. Presumably, he intended La Religieuse to be a metaphor of freedom and repression. Even if it only reflects a peculiarly virulent anticlericalism, the movie has considerable powers to shock.

Hugo and Josefin is childhood sunny-side up. As in Elvira Madigan, there is the bitterSwede evocation of transient things--youth, daylight, love. And there is the now customary classical sound track--Handel and Beethoven--to augment a romantic tale. This time, however, the romance is of children infatuated with the natural world. Josefin, a parson's shy daughter, meets a little boy named Hugo, a free sprite with a wise tongue and merry feet. The two plunge into summer, riding an old-fashioned two-wheeler, running through dappled woods, sharing a common joy in such everyday activities as seeing, eating and breathing. A sticky lacquer of Christian symbolism covers some of the scenario, and the preening camera work often asks who is the prettiest of them all. But Hugo and Josefin is rescued from its incipient mannerism by the stars--two amateurs as spontaneous as the weather.

Iron Curtain films that have a political message are usually more interesting than those that do not: censorship often seems to bring out subtlety in the artist's hand. The Red and the White is unusual in proposing that neither side in the Russian Revolution had a monopoly on evil. The White Russians are shown as human beings capable of courage as well as atrocities--like their Red enemies. To be sure, the Bolsheviks ultimately seem to display greater bravery and commit fewer outrages, but propaganda was not Hungarian Director Miklos Jancso's aim.

Instead, he views the war as a lethal chess game in which his camera alternates from side to side, until war becomes a force beyond control of the combatants. The Red and the White becomes the tortured landscape of a country's soul through a series of ironic contrasts: biplanes flying above horsemen, love scenes interrupted by violence, military bands trumpeting gaily after the executions of wounded soldiers.

A Report on the Party and the Guests has a double point to its sharp allegory: made in 1966, it could not be shown in pre-Dubcek Czechoslovakia, and it may not be shown there now. An assortment of men and women at a party are vaguely annoyed to find themselves being organized and harassed by a smiling, sinister type. Just when he seems to be going too far in hectoring the guests with silly rules, the conciliatory host appears. He shepherds them to rows of banquet tables with magnificent candelabra and very little food.

When one of the guests walks out, the host turns peevish. After all he's done for them--shouldn't the deserter really be brought back so that they all can enjoy themselves together? "Since he left all, all must go look for him," someone says. And off they go, running through the woods--armed with guns, behind a baying, growling dog.

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