Garlic and Sapphires

By Stefan Hunter, JAY COCKS, J.C., Mark Goodman, S.K.

The New York Film Festival is a peculiar combination of international no-talents and geniuses, a show, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, of "garlic and sapphires in the mud." Last week, at its opening, the garlic was very much in evidence. This week some sapphires glint:

Tristana. Like their greatest paisano, Picasso, Spanish geniuses have their roots in another century or their homes in another country. Except for that grand exception: Luis Bunuel. The Old Aragonese, 70, has reached a modus vivendi with Franco Spain, and returned to create in Tristana a coda of inexhaustible power and sophistication. Like the world reflected in a convex mirror, every element is in this masterwork --but somehow transfigured and amplified. People are themselves and something other. Even the film's title has a dual meaning: Tristana suggests "sadness," and is the name of its heroine, impeccably played by Catherine Deneuve.

Tristana is the ward of a graying voluptuary, Don Lope (Fernando Key). Lope is an aristocrat, an atheist and a hypocrite--three distinct personalities that Rey manages to portray simultaneously. As his money and his vigor recede, Don Lope pursues the bewildered girl and overtakes her. Once seduced, Tristana is a figure of metastasizing vengeance. When she becomes the mistress of a young artist (Franco Nero), Don Lope shouts in misery, "I prefer tragedy to ridicule . . ." The girl awards him both. Her flight with the artist is ended by a disease that costs her a leg. Convalescing in the house of her for mer guardian, Tristana hears Lope, stricken with a heart attack, rattling in his bed. She starts to call a doctor, then lowers the phone to its cradle . . .

The classic elements of youth and age, jealousy and revenge may seem better suited to opera than to modern film. But Bunuel recognizes no visual or emotional barriers. His scenario seems, rhythmically, to have been composed on the guitar. It traverses wit and melancholy, surrealism and truth without missing a quarter note.

Much of Tristana's success lies in the director's scrupulous ambition. Once he was satisfied with the village atheism of Nazarin or the facile eroticism of Belle de Jour. In his 29th film, he is content with nothing less than the face of Spain. Don Lope's backchat with his comrades is an indelible vignette of the inhuman condition, where the aging pick the reputations of their fallen comrades, like buzzards wheeling over cadavers. In the background hover the symbolic figures of deaf-mutes, youths whose voices, like many Spaniards', cannot be heard. Yet Tristana is no celluloid editorial. Whatever its impetus, it ends with disguised love. The music of the voices, the soft light, the national tone of resignation illuminate a country of bottomless tradition where even a career anarchist and antichrist like Bunuel must, at last, be overwhelmed by the past.

-Stefan Kanfer

Chikamatzu Monogatari is one of the last and greatest films by that prodigious Japanese director, the late Kenji Mizoguchi. Renowned as a film maker with an extraordinary understanding of female characters, Mizoguchi in Chikamatzu created a memorable male figure, a shy scrollmaker who falls in love with his master's wife. Mizoguchi's genius was in rendering the past (Chikamatzu takes place in 17th century Kyoto) with consummate realism.

The scrollmaker and his master's wife are more achingly real and their plight more affectingly familiar than the people and plots of any dozen "contemporary" love stories. One of the supreme Japanese stylists, Mizoguchi composed each shot like a canvas and kept the images on screen long enough for the eye to dwell slowly and lovingly over each of them.

-Jay Cocks

Une Simple Histoire is, very literally indeed, a simple story. Directed by Marcel Hanoun and based on a true incident, the film chronicles the wanderings of a woman and child looking for work and lodging in Paris. This is the only plot, and Hanoun has little interest in embellishing it with background and motivation: he never even makes it clear, for example, whether the woman is the child's mother, guardian or companion. Une Simple Histoire is, more than a narrative, a formal stylistic exercise so rigorously disciplined and understated that it makes the visual asceticism of Robert Bresson seem almost Felliniesque by comparison.

There are no exotic camera angles, no intricate camera movements. The woman's misfortunes are put forward through a first-person narration consisting entirely of simple declarative sentences. Unfortunately, rendered in subtitles, this technique occasionally makes the heroine not so much pitiful as mechanical. Onscreen, she may begin to melt down a bar of chocolate to mix with some milk for the child and the title will say, "I melted down a bar of chocolate to mix with some milk to give to Sylvie." This kind of redundancy threatens at times to retard the action to the point of stasis.

Still, Une Simple Histoire is never boring; and mannered as it sometimes may be, Hanoun's unflinching formalism succeeds often enough to make him not just a maverick, but a curious and undeniably compelling film maker.

-J.C.

The Garden of Delights is actually a botany of depravity in which Spanish Director Carlos Saura sows his bleak vision of mankind's angst and avarice. With an unfaltering eye for human evil, and swatches of humor as black as Torquemada's robes, Saura demonstrates that he is a worthy protege of his idol, Luis Bunuel.

Antonio Como (Jose Luis Lopez Vasquez) is a once powerful industrialist reduced by an automobile accident to a virtual vegetable in his own garden. His incapacity is pitifully childlike: to entice him to drink his daily milkshake, a servant must first bare her breast. But his mind still functions with chaotic clarity as he fantasizes the possible consequences of his helplessness. He sees himself in his wheelchair careening wildly across the quiet greensward and into the swimming pool; mailed lancers from the picture that covers his office wall safe appear before him and try to ride him down. More harrowing is Antonio's grasp of his family's greed. Prowling around him like jackals sniffing carrion, they probe mercilessly for his Swiss bank account number.

Antonio is partially snapped back to reality by hearing a recording of a fraudulently liberal speech he once delivered to his workers. As he returns to his place at the head of the company's conference table, though, he can do no better than recite his previous year's speech to the board of directors. He cannot even successfully kill his petulant wife, who laughs at him as he tries to push her from a rowboat crying, "An American Tragedy!" He ultimately realizes that he can never recover amid such macabre people--all of whom are as crippled spiritually as he is physically.

-Mark Goodman

Street Scenes 1970. Visually, aurally, this documentary is acute enough to be sealed in a cornerstone. Psychologically, philosophically, it is another kind of souvenir altogether. Street Scenes could serve the next century as a unilaterally disarming record of those wretched days in May following the Kent State tragedy. After ritual footage of William Kunstler expounding on youth as savior and David Dellinger paranoiacally linking the Mafia with the Federal Government, Director Martin Scorsese zeroes in on the futile confrontations of street people and straights, hardhats and students, soldiers and peace marchers.

The reportage of construction workers savaging students is an indelible segment of war film. Its hasty sketches of street debate tell more about polarized America than a thousand editorials. Polemicists boom at one another, scoring in a game with no referees. Full of heat, devoid of compassion, they become like radios facing one another, all tuned to different stations.

What then is so wrong with Street Scenes? Principally, its inability to comprehend. It is openly empathetic with the students, but it gives them no voice except to shout slogans. Its sound track puts down "dinky little secretaries" who will not take a day off to protest the war. It milks easy laughs from those classic villains, the know-nothing cab driver and the harried postman. To be sure, the film eventually recognizes its own faults. "We can't reach the working people," concludes one of the crew. But acknowledging blindness does not grant vision; diagnosis is no cure. Alien to the laborers it cannot hope to convince, preacher to the converted, Street Scenes is, in essence, no more than a smoothly edited student film. As such, it must be graded: B-.

-S.K.

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