If Does Not Equal Zero

Lindsay Anderson is a director who knows a good movie when he sees one, and apparently he has seen Jean Vigo's 1933 masterpiece, Zero for Conduct. Anderson's If ... contains ideas, characters and even a climactic scene reminiscent of Zero. The difference lies in accomplishment. James Agee rightly called Zero "one of the few great movie poems." Anderson's If . . . is occasionally powerful and moving, but even at its best it is never more than forceful and faintly mannered prose.

Like Zero, If . . . has a loose patchwork of schoolboy fantasies for its plot. The film opens at the beginning of another term at an English boarding school. All is noise and confusion as the old boys greet each other and the new ones, called "scum," struggle to find their room assignments. Gradually, the focus narrows to a group of three upperclassmen (Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Warwick) who are restless, cynical and chafing under the discipline of the house whips. They spend a lot of their time sneaking swigs of vodka and planning romantic acts of rebellion. After a particularly strenuous caning by the head whip, the three take a blood oath: "Death to the oppressor!" They turn a school military exercise into a rout by threatening to bayonet an officer, and later sabotage the school's Speech Day ceremonies by detonating a smoke bomb and gunning down faculty, parents and students as they stream out of the auditorium. The film ends with its own Kiplingesque title, at once a speculation, an incitement and even a promise.

A onetime documentary film maker who has a realist's unfailing sense of place, Anderson makes College House so horrifyingly tangible that it becomes the main character in the film. His sense of fantasy, however, is not as acute. Anderson films every scene, imagined or real, as if it were actually happening--a technique that suspends disbelief without enriching the narrative.

If . . . badly needs and sadly lacks the sort of heretical lyricism that Vigo brought to Zero. Vigo said more about the nature of freedom and repression, about schoolboys and their world of desperate fantasy in a single scene than Anderson does in an entire film. If, as the Rolling Stones sing, "the time is right for palace revolution," then If . . . may be a timely film. Still, Zero for Conduct will remain the timeless one.

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