More a Famine than a Festival

By JAY COCKS

It was like staging a banquet and serving leftovers. Aside from Francois Truffaut's Small Change (TIME, Oct. 11) and Marcel Ophuls' The Memory of Justice (see below), the 14th annual New York Film Festival offered among its 19 features few works of real, ranging quality. The festival is the most prestigious in the country--and, internationally, one of the most selective--so this year's slim pickings suggest that the surge in quality film making of the past few years has, at least for the moment, slowed down. The U.S. was represented by only a program of short films and an indignant, simplistic documentary about coal miners in Kentucky. Harlan County U.S.A. is well-meaning, and audiences responded warmly. Those who liked it may have been inspired by the same glib spirit that leads socialites to embrace lettuce pickers, or perhaps they were just desperate.

The festival did try to add a touch of spice, which seems to have become de rigueur since Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris stirred things up four years ago. But this year's offering, In the Realm of the Senses, directed by Japan's Nagisa Oshima, was impounded by U.S. customs officials after they viewed it at a press screening. Nobody seemed to mind much, which probably had less to do with indifference to civil liberties than with general embarrassment over the quality of the film. In the Realm of the Senses is like the customs' seizure itself--way past ludicrous, close to contemptible.

Oshima extrapolated the film from a real incident. In Tokyo in the 1930s, a prostitute concluded her love affair with a gangster by castrating him, then wandered the streets for several days carrying his severed sex organs. Haunted by Genet and Mishima, animated by memories of De Sade, Oshima splashes a devious course to this bloody resolution. He has the gangster and the whore coupling incessantly, in attitudes reminiscent of the delicate rough-and-tumble of erotic Japanese watercolors. The point of all this--that the full realization of passion is its own justification, that death is the ultimate orgasm--is too familiar to be outrageous and too shallow to matter.

Now safely past the savaging that once seemed imminent (TIME, May 12, 1975), Ophuls' The Memory of Justice was shown at the festival, and has been released theatrically, in just the form the director intended: unaltered, uncompromised. It is a significant victory because The Memory of Justice is a major work of art and of conscience. Vastly ambitious, deeply personal, the movie is a meditation on the fallibilities and blind necessity of justice. The initial focus is on the Nuremberg war trials. Ophuls considers, then questions the precepts and precedents established at the trials. Even as he does this, he also evokes pre and postwar Germany and raises the specter of criminal actions during more contemporary conflicts in Algeria and Viet Nam. The film was inspired by Telford Taylor's book Nuremberg and Viet Nam: An American Tragedy, and Taylor himself appears prominently in it. His presence provides historical continuity and gives the movie a sort of de facto protagonist. Like Taylor, Ophuls finds--indeed, insists--that a distinction must be made between planned political genocide and individual incidents in which field actions turn insane (like My Lai). Ophuls then widens the focus of his movie to examine an inescapable paradox that he has termed "the impossibility of judgment versus the necessity of judgment."

Ophuls' scope is so large that the film becomes at times unwieldy, threatening even to lose its balance entirely. These disadvantages, however, are virtually inseparable from what is most distinctive about Ophuls--an intellectual restlessness, a moral sense that remains implacable. In short, his faults are secondary consequences of his gifts. Because Ophuls is such a fine film essayist, it is easy to overlook his talents as a dramatist. Like his other films, The Memory of Justice is long, more than 4 1/2 hours, but what makes it continually enthralling is Ophuls' ability to shape compelling characterizations through his interviews. He shows Telford Taylor as a tempered idealist but a humanist still, "our Mr. Deeds," as Ophuls has called him; Albert Speer openly but perhaps a shade too smoothly discussing his own culpability for Nazi tyranny; a woman widowed by Viet Nam hanging on with cool, desperate anger to ideas of God, flag and country; the parents of another Viet Nam casualty mourning the loss not just of their son but of their ideals. All of these people and many more --Grand Admiral Doenitz, Yehudi Menuhin, Daniel Ellsberg, even the film maker himself--become characters out of history that, because of work like The Memory of Justice, will endure. Ophuls' particular genius is not just to re-examine history but to enlarge it.

A minor work, certainly, but luminous still, Satyajit Ray's The Middleman concerns compromise, the collapse of a class, the exigencies of desperation. For such large themes, the story itself is notably modest. A young college graduate who lives in Calcutta with his father, brother and sister cannot find a job. After almost a year of unemployment, Somnath (gently played by Pradip Mukherjee) defies the traditions of his Brahman background and goes into small business, hustling everything from stationery to industrial whitening, buying low, selling high, pocketing the difference. He is called, politely, a "middleman." Somnath learns soon enough that to be a success, certain principles must be modified, others scrapped entirely. By the end of the film, as he tries desperately to procure a textile contract, Somnath has literally become a pimp. The Middleman is understated, sorrowful, full of sly, rueful humor. Ray remains one of the cinema's best poets of the lost chance and a vanishing culture.

Rites of Passage, the portmanteau title for three short films about the painful passing of adolescence, is a decidedly mixed blessing. Most prominently, the program offers two splendid performances. In Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Shelley Duvall brings a graceful vulnerability and unguarded beauty to the role of an ugly-duckling adolescent who is first encouraged in social flirtations, then undone by an attractive, more popular cousin. Director Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street) misses the stronger undercurrents of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original story, just as Novice Director Peter Werner is defeated by the portentous gothic glooms of the Joyce Carol Gates story he adapted, In the Region of Ice. Actress Fionnuala Flanagan, though, finds just the right portions of grave surprise and spiritual disquiet in the role of a young nun besieged and baffled by the unrelenting attentions of one of her students. Werner at least displays a studied visual flair, a good, strict sense of film rhythm and a willingness to give his actors generous creative space. All these qualities were absent from Sunday Funnies, the program's third installment, a meat-cleaver satire about prom night in the '50s that had all the wit and technical finesse of a stag reel.

Akira Kurosawa is one of the few epic poets of the cinema, and his new movie, Dersu Uzala, brought the festival moments of real majesty. Shot in Russia--in 70-mm. screen size and stereophonic sound--Dersu Uzala is a rather delicate fable about the friendship between a Russian surveyor (Juri Solomine) and the man he employs as a guide. Dersu Uzala (ebulliently and affectionately played by Maxim Munzuk) lives in the forests of eastern Siberia in easy alliance with the natural order. The surveyor, called "the Captain," is a man of science and precision. Dersu is a creature of instinct and superstition.

In the first part of the film, both men are marooned on a vast frozen lake. Dersu saves them from freezing by building a hut cut of dry grass, deploying some tools of civilization (rifles, a surveying instrument) as the frame for the shelter. It is the Captain, however, who later pulls Dersu out of a rushing river by constructing a rescue device from a felled tree and a couple of leather belts. The scene is both exciting and funny: Dersu, clinging to a rock in the water, has to shout instructions to the Captain.

Later, Dersu goes to live with the Captain and his family in town. But he is gradually stifled. Kurosawa is not facile, and he does not hymn the natural man just to condemn the spiritual debilitations of modern life. Dersu Uzala takes place during the first decade of the century and suggests that the ideal reconciliation of urban knowledge and bucolic temperament is, sadly, unattainable. Dersu Uzala may be a shade over-inflated and simplistic, but it also has the clear resonance of genius. Kurosawa can find grandeur in the intimate as well as the infinite.

It is easy to imagine the eight major characters of Alain Tanner's Jonas Who Will Be Twenty-Five in the Year 2000 bundling into the back of the moving van owned by the protagonist of Wim Wenders' dour Kings of the Road. Wenders' people are preoccupied with their own rootlessness. In Tanner's mirthless Swiss political comedy everyone is one variety or another of Boho Marxist. In Kings of the Road, the hero, Bruno, and his sidekick, Robert, are only sporadically looking to connect. For the most part, they have engineered a working arrangement with hopelessness. They ride from one small, shabby West German town to another, while Bruno repairs equipment in dilapidated movie theaters. The musty dream palaces have turned into mausoleums with chewing gum on the seats.

The landscape of the movie, shot mostly along the East German frontier, abounds in gutted industrial towers, deserted factories and vacant houses. Kings of the Road, which is almost three hours long, rambles aimlessly like Bruno and his pal. It does, however, project a fitfully vigorous vision of a troubled generation and a languishing land.

Tanner's Jonas, on the other hand, is shot in sprightly colors, but seems to have had the vitality talked out of it. Here are eight characters in search of a dialectic, survivors of the new politics, the new morality, living on the ragged fringes of the old order, wondering why things have not come right. One runs an experimental school, another (zestily and engagingly played by Miou-Miou) is a supermarket cashier who deliberately undercharges her customers. This is a good, fertile field for comedy, but Tanner plows it under with self-seriousness and congenital melancholy.

The Marquise of O... is a further reminder that Director Eric Rohmer cannot be bested at creating an atmosphere of austere sensuality. Previous films like My Night at Maude's and Claire's Knee are a little donnish, paced out and measured so carefully that watching them can be like waiting for the moon to wane. The Marquise of O ... is much the same. It is formalized, talky, almost meditative in its unhurried consideration of an unlikely event: in 1799 an Austrian widow takes an ad in a local paper, calling for the father of her unborn child to come forward. Up until this time, her reputation has been beyond reproach.

The Marquise (irresistibly acted by Edith Clever) insists, however, that the prospective father is unknown to her, and, further, that she has no idea how she became pregnant. She is turned out of her home by furious parents, who refuse to credit her innocence, and pursued by her fiance, a lieutenant colonel of the Russian army. He turns up in answer to the newspaper ad, to the considerable horror of the Marquise. He had saved her from being raped by his own troops; now he seems to her not a savior, but a devil.

The resolution of this sly tale (based on an 18th century short story by Heinrich von Kleist) is elegant and touching, infused with cautionary wisdom. "You would never have looked like the devil to me," the Marquise tells her colonel, "if, when I first saw you, you had not appeared as an angel." Rohmer's great talent lies in telling such parables of fallibility and principle so wittily that they seem less like lessons than grace notes. His tone throughout is even, amused, compassionate, but the texture of his film is warm, full of sinuous light and voluptuous colors.

For all the pre-fab scandale surrounding In the Realm of the Senses, The Marquise of O . . . contained the sexiest scene of the festival, a vivid, lingering moment when the courting colonel slips his arm around the Marquise's waist. This vivid, intimate gesture is one fair indication of the casual, quiet intensity that Rohmer can build.

Jay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.