Festival, Round 2

By JAY COCKS, R.Z. Sheppard

It was looking grim there for a while, say around the time of the feature documentary on Artist David Hockney with the scene of all those naked young men jumping into a swimming pool in slow motion. During its second and final week, however, the New York Film Festival pulled itself together and recovered smartly. Notes on some of the more outstanding selections:

LA PALOMA is a wonderfully mad shotgun wedding of high camp, movie mythology, bad taste, obsessive romanticism and impudent satire. It is also oddly --very oddly--moving; not innovative, perhaps, but quite unique. The second film of a young Swiss named Daniel Schmid, it is a reshaping of the story of Camille, with some strains from La Traviata thrown in for good measure. Imagine a hothouse hybrid of the work of Ken Russell and Roger Gorman, and the overstuffed, overcharged texture of the film can just be approximated. La Paloma is set in Europe of the 1930s as it might have been dreamed by Aubrey Beardsley. What makes the movie so fresh, in addition to lavish visual invention, is Schmid's ability to reconcile opposites: reverence and mockery, cruelty and poignancy. La Paloma is the kind of necromancy that unsettles equilibrium and kindles quick, if baffled responses: whatever it is, it certainly is some kind of fantastic movie.

CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, delicate, mysterious and exciting, takes two girls (Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier) and puts them down in a fairy tale of their own making. Both of them live in worlds of impervious fantasy anyway:

one is a magician, the other a librarian.

They discover an old house in the Paris suburbs and go there separately. The strange edifice envelops them for a time, but the only tangible proof of their visits is the piece of hard candy they find in their mouths. When the girls swallow the candy later it plunges them, like one of Alice's Wonderland potions, back into their experiences in the house.

Jacques Rivette's powerful and ambitious movie is structured like a puzzle.

Bits of fantasy occur at different times, and the girls must compare their separate experiences--all archetypes from childhood fairy tales--to piece together the whole magical enigma.

THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD, also made by a Swiss, Alain Tanner (The Salamander), is as coolly intelligent and as subtle as La Paloma is giddy. The film concerns the intense affair between an engineer running for local political office (Philippe Leotard) and a waitress (Olimpia Carlisi). Their joyous mutual carnality nearly convinces them both that they were made for each other. The engineer still believes it, in fact, when the waitress leaves him. This film is wise in the ways and reasons people deceive themselves, rich in its exploration of the blindness that fervor can bring.

LE FANTOME DE LA LIBERTE, by Luis Bufiuel is an antic series of absurdist parlor tricks. All the surreal illusions are linked rather casually by the theme of freedom, by the lunatic effects caused by man's repressive passion for order.

The movie is black and blasphemous in Bunuel's manner. It is not so piquant as his recent The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but it is full of effusive invention and flourishes of high humor that do not seem to tax the 74-year-old director in the least.

Some sequences are among his most indelible. One is a fancy social occasion, at which all the guests gather around the glass-and-chrome dining-room table and seat themselves on toilets. They let their bodily functions run their course but are delicate only about the mention of food. When a guest gets hungry, -he inquires discreetly of the maid about the location of the dining room, then retires for a meal in solitary contentment.

Similarly rude jokes are made about the Roman Catholic clergy, the judicial system, bourgeois prudery. There is a fine, crafty sequence in which the parents of a little girl are outraged by postcards their daughter has been given by a shady character --color views of architectural landmarks. Here, as ever, watching Bunuel work his savagery is an exhilarating blood sport. --Jay cocks A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is a relentless stare at the intimacies of daily life. Director John Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands plays Mable Longhetti, an emotionally disturbed housewife and mother whose effusive displays of affection land her in a mental ward. Her construction-worker husband Nick (Peter Falk) vainly attempts to handle the situation with equal doses of tenderness and temper. His intentions are good, but he constantly says and does the wrong thing. Falk wings the role with his customary charm of a man who cannot decide if he is a frog or a prince. Rowlands too is at home in her part as a Woolworth madonna. Whatever Cassavetes might have intended to say about working-class women and then-men, his film remains essentially a love story.

When Nick and Mable are alone, there is no doubt about the uncompromising individuality of Cassavetes' meaning: a man's home is not only his castle but his inviolate nuthouse. qedR.Z. Sheppard

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