Festival (Contd.)

With a few honorable exceptions, the New York Film Festival, now in its ninth year, has come to mean timorous experiments and feeble works from "name" directors. Some representative features this year:

FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER Robert Bresson? Surely not the Robert Bresson. The director whose work (Diary of a Country Priest; Mouchette) has the bite and permanence of a woodcut? It seems inconceivable that Bresson could have confected this pastel romance. Everything in it has been said before in cheap yellowbacked French novels. A boy, Jacques (Guillaume des Forets), spies a girl, Marthe (Isabel Weingarten), on the bank of the Seine. Marthe is in tears; her lover has abandoned her. She consoles herself with Jacques. Helas, the affair is only a dream; in the end it is shattered by the little ironies of circumstance. During their chaste interlude, Jacques and Marthe bathetically wander the streets of Paris, serenaded by muzzy folk singers and a bossa nova group whose sentimentality matches the scenario. Four Nights of a Dreamer is adapted from a story by Dostoevsky. Surely not the Feodor Dostoevsky. . .

DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD In this piece of lightweight scholarship, Director-Critic Peter Bogdanovich reviews the career of John Ford as if he were anatomizing the canon of Yeats. Ford, director of classic Americana from Stagecoach to The Grapes of Wrath to The Last Hurrah, is an artist of enormous sweep. But he has been guilty of certain venial sins, among them boozy sentimentality and the use of overfamiliar stock characters. In Bogdanovich's eyes every blemish is a virtue, and no detail is too trivial to examine. He traces, for example, the history of a gesture first used by Harry Carey and later mimicked by John Wayne. Far more interesting than the critical narrative are four interviews interspersed with glimpses of Ford movies. Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda are all in their 60s; they are juvenile leads when they discuss the director with terror and awe. Better still is Ford himself regarding Bogdanovich with rue and deflecting questions about his aesthetics with "Yeah," "No" and "Cut." Ford knows what Wordsworth knew: "We murder to dissect." Damned if he will assist this callow intern in his operation.

DECAMERON Pier Paolo Pasolini, an avowed Marxist who makes pallid films of Christianity (The Gospel According to St. Matthew; Theorem), has taken on more than he can eschew. Using ten of Boccaccio's tales, Pasolini twits the church by showing lascivious nuns, self-mocking ghosts, corrupt priests and finally the trials of the painter Giotto, played by Pasolini himself. Giotto was a cornerstone of Renaissance painting; Pasolini plays him as an interior decorator. Boccaccio was famous for his ribaldry; Pasolini is notorious for his vapidity. To adapt the Decameron successfully, a film maker must come to his senses--of sin and humor. Pasolini's version is senseless down to the last vignette.

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