Robust Sickness

By S.K.

"Classicism is health," wrote Goethe. "Romanticism a disease." By those very rigid standards, First Love is a sick film--admirably sick with love. It is also the robust debut of a film maker to be admired and watched. Just about every actor insists that "what I really want to do is direct." Maximilian Schell has not been content merely to yearn; he has made it happen.

Based on Ivan Turgenev's novella, First Love is the deceptively elemental narrative of an adolescent smitten by his father's mistress. "It is a story unusually lit with affection and nature," says Schell. "I decided only one photographer could really do it--Sven Nykvist, the artist who does Bergman's films. When he agreed I knew the picture would happen, and that it would work." Schell's instinct has proved infallible. Nykvist has filled the film with indelible imagery. The sunlight is a featured player of humor and warmth. Interiors seem to exhale melancholy. Weightless figures hover on the horizon and are swallowed by the sky.

Propelled Forward. The girl, Sinaida (Dominique Sanda), is an impoverished princess with a fatal blessing; unrelieved sensuality. She attracts not only the youth Alexander (John Moulder Brown) but a whole galaxy of worshipers, including Alexander's repressed father (Maximilian Schell) and Poet-Pretender Maidanov, played with self-mocking gusto by Playwright John Osborne.

Steeped in 19th century tradition, the story could not but end sadly, with the girl dead, the boy suddenly grown older and wiser. Even the wild poet becomes a domesticated civil servant. Turgenev published First Love in 1860, when peasant restiveness was a background rumble. It is to Schell's credit that the scenario has been propelled forward 55 years--to the eve of the October Revolution--without losing its balance. Only in the choice of background music does the director lose track of the score, alternating from Chopin to a muted rock. Turgenev needs no varnish of "relevance." The story of First Love endures beyond fashion because, like all real art, it steps to the immutable rhythm of life.

In all other respects, Schell has proved himself a first-rate director. Will he act again? "For a good director, for a good role, of course. In the meantime, I will put together my own projects." The next? A film about German youth confronting the German past. "The money will not be great, the budget may be restricted. But at last I can make the films I believe in. What more compensation can a man want?"

o S.K.

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