Revolution on the Riviera

For more than two decades, movie men have huffed and puffed onto the Cote d'Azur once a year to promote their wares at the International Film Festival at Cannes. Then they have gone home, leaving behind vast sums of money, countless Cuban cigar butts and occasional trend-setting films--Marty, One Potato Two Potato, Easy Rider. This year the trend was to revolution. "Right now," explained Producer Irwin Winkler, "we live in a time when revolution is a very salable commodity."

Serious film makers are usually at odds with moneymen, and this year's emphasis on youthful rebellion served to deepen the difference. Warner Brothers' contribution to flackery was several hundred students bused in to organize a demonstration. In the middle of a group of spectators and tough French cops, a small group of students unfurled some innocuous banners and began to croon, "All we are asking is give peace a chance." Then the protesters launched into a version of "We Shall Overcome." The cops had heard that one before, and scented trouble. One of them began to advance. The demonstrators gulped and retreated. With much trepidation, a student approached the cop and explained: "Listen, it's only a promotion for Woodstock."

Sam and Samantha. The films themselves ranged from underground polemics to sleek Hollywood productions. Jean-Luc Godard, in the epicenter of the revolution as always, offered West Wind, written in part by Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The film has its practical side: there are detailed descriptions of how to make gasoline bombs, fuses and timers. From the other side of the Atlantic came M.A.S.H., Woodstock, and a film still unreleased in the U.S., The Strawberry Statement.

Directed by Stuart Hagmann and written by Israel Horovitz, Strawberry Statement is based on James Kunen's informal memoirs of the Columbia University rebellion of 1968. "I want to reach Sam and Samantha in Aurora, Illinois," Hagmann says. "I want people to say, That's just like my kids.' " If Sam and Samantha say anything of the sort, it will be because their kids have taken up campus revolution for no more discernible reasons than sex and excitement. Despite endless minutes of sirens, screams, clubs and tear gas at the finale, Strawberry Statement only manages to make the point that Americans can make musical comedy of anything, including youthful dissent. The shallowness of the movie became all the more obvious when newspapers carried photographs of the killings at Kent State the morning after the screening. "It was a nightmare that day," said Hagmann, "with the reporters coming through saying it was great for sales."

It took the final U.S. entry, M.A.S.H., to clear away the nasty aftertaste of commercialized commitment. Oddly enough, this was the one protest film based on the uses of bad taste--an insanely funny movie expressing the moral disproportion between war and lesser evils by showing the reality of both. As Director Robert Altman said: "Politics? I'm more concerned with behavior, with the insanity of order. This whole syndrome--the new films, and acting things out in protest--this may be a cry for revolution, yet through these media a bloodless one."

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