Monday, Oct. 21, 1985

Crying "Shame" At Lincoln Center

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The morally outraged, intent on what they conceive to be the Lord's work, usually end by doing an ace press agent's job publicizing the object of their disapproval. In 1950 Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle, about a simple village woman impregnated by a shepherd she thinks is divine, benefited from this ironic corollary to the law of unintended consequences. Now comes Hail Mary, Jean-Luc Godard's modern and, to say the least, highly vernacular version of the story of the Annunciation and the Virgin Birth. Having been denounced, sight unseen, by no less a critic than Pope John Paul II ("deeply wounds the religious sentiments of believers") and having been picketed by Roman Catholic lay organizations all over Europe, the film opened in New York City last week to an all too predictable response.

On the Sunday prior to the two screenings of the picture at the New York Film Festival, John Cardinal O'Connor denounced Hail Mary from the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral and told potential protesters that he would be with them in spirit. Monday-evening moviegoers were forced to run a gauntlet created by some 5,000 demonstrators reciting the rosary and shouting "Shame." Police and festival officials were surprised by the size and vociferousness of the crowd, and there were moments when they feared an ugly clash. The second night more police were on duty, and the number of demonstrators had shrunk to fewer than 1,000.

Even in diminished numbers, the activists called extra attention to Godard's numbingly fragmented, emotionally and intellectually self-absorbed movie, turning it into the kind of minor scandal that compresses neatly into a 60- second spot on the TV news. Defenders of the film kept observing last week that like the Pope, most of the protesters had not seen Hail Mary. But that misses the point. The simple things that the media could report in a few words are indeed there in the film. The Virgin (Myriem Roussel) is presented as a gas-station attendant whose language is anything but pure. Her "Uncle" Gabriel does arrive by jet plane dressed and behaving like a police-state thug, and her would-be husband Joseph responds to Mary's predicament more like a wimp than a saint. Above all, Mary does appear several times in the nude, though never in a manner that could be described as erotically arousing.

But these are merely attention-getting devices in a story Godard seems to have borrowed partly because of its publicity value, mostly because it supports his meditations on matters of more personal concern to him. Certainly Hail Mary cannot be called reverent, as some of the film's admirers have insisted, for it does not cohere into a revitalizing reinterpretation of myth. On the other hand, flat and uncontentious, Hail Mary lacks the obsessive, village-atheist compulsion for outrageous jokes that imparted such wild animation to the Monty Python Life of Brian. Nor does Godard, who was born a Protestant, betray the passionate love-hate for a childhood religion that moves someone like the gifted young playwright Christopher Durang to his fine, God-haunted madness. Some early critics have proposed that Godard has attempted a story about father-daughter incest, but he makes almost nothing of that theme either. The festival's program note more intelligently describes Hail Mary as a "meditation on the divine enigma of womanhood as perceived by any man who is both drawn to and excluded from (woman's) secrets." In fact, the better passages muse with some discernment on such matters as the freedom from debilitating involvements that can be one of chastity's gifts. But mostly the movie reads as a middle-aged man's wistful, somewhat pathetic fantasy about how a young woman can be dominated by a powerful father figure without resort to sex. There may be sacrilege in that thought, but there is even more banality. Had the director not pressed his other religious allusions home so crudely, it is one that might have passed unnoted except by devoted cinephiles.

But that's Godard's way. His role in cinema is as a saboteur of the conventions of well-made bourgeois narrative. His dialogue scenes tend to be brusquely elliptical and, as in Hail Mary, they are often abruptly juxtaposed with meandering and murky monologues. This is sometimes electrifying, sometimes stultifying, but the style does sever film's historic ties to conventional drama and fiction. Godard's ideas, however, remain tightly tied to a kind of old-fashioned radicalism that shocks far less effectively than his editing does. That shock value worked up the ire of American Catholics. Fear of pressure from them caused an arm of Columbia Pictures, itself a Coca- Cola subsidiary, to drop distribution of the picture. (It has been picked up by an independent concern.) Catholic activists have called on New York Governor Mario Cuomo to fire his arts chairman, Kitty Carlisle Hart, because the festival receives a modest subsidy from the state arts council (as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts). At least one lay group is protesting to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that the screening of Hail Mary violates their religious rights.

One cannot help thinking, however, that since the film has given the nation's Catholics the opportunity to offer public testimony to their faith, - they ought to let it die in peace, shrouded in the cloud of ennui that its antidramatic structure and muddled intentions generate.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/New York