The New York Film Festival

The New York Film Festival

by

Vince Alletti

A film is a kind of detour that leads us back to ourselves.

Jean-Luc Godard

This is a report on the Tenth New York Film Festival, a collection of 24 films shown over a period of slightly more than two weeks (September 29 to October 14) in one of the smaller theatres of the Lincoln Center complex, 1,096-seat Alice Tully Hall. Although an unusually large number of films (10) were released in New York within days of their festival screenings, and several others can expect eventual American release, an equal number may never be seen in this country. Many of them will never be missed, but if past festivals are any indication, a few of the festival’s best films also fail to pick up distributors.

It’s these one-time-only screenings that have become one of the major attractions of the New York festival since it has begun to function more and more as a sneak preview spectacular. There are several other attractions: With blocks of tickets at $1 and $2 (as well as $3 and $4) the festival can be a bargain for filmgoers — providing they get to the boxoffice early: tickets for all screenings this year sold out within a few days, many of the cheap seats within a few hours. The Lincoln Center theatres #re altogether more comfortable than almost any local movie house; practically as good as lying in bed watchiiig TV. And, of course, there’s the glamour of one continuous opening night, the director and occasionally the stars spotlighted in their “box” seats, the audience copping an attitude from Cannes and Venice and erupting in applause or boos. In previous years, there have been supplemental programs — shorts, retrospectives, documentaries — screened in other areas of the Center, but this year’s special events were restricted to a series of press conferencetype panels, usually with the film’s director and other filmmakers working in related styles — such as one with Marcel Ophuls (The Sorrow and the Pity), A1 Maysles (Gimme Shelter), Howard Smith, Sarah Kernochan (Marfoe) and Frederick Wiseman (High School) — or simply a moderator; the Mekas brothers, Warhol and Morrissey, Truffaut, Godard and Gorin and a few others appeared on such panels following their films. The films are discussed in the order they were shown at the festival, leaving out, I’m afraid, one of the most anticipated films screened this year, Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, with Marlon Brando, which was not screened for the press.

Chloe in the Afternoon (L 'Amour, L'Apres-midi) — Eric Rohmer: Rohmer’s concluding “Moral Tale” is not as glowing as Claire's Knee or as rigorous as My Night At Maud's but it continues in his rather talky, almost novelistic style to investigate the chosen theme of love beset by temptation. In this case, Frederic, a fairly ordinary, young, married businessman, is confronted with Chloe, an aggressive, manipulative but oddly charming young woman who begins turning up in his office in hopes of reviving a somewhat tenuous acquaintance. Frederic is at first put off, then fascinated. Because Chloe is seen only through Frederic’s eyes, or only in conjunction with him, Rohmer carries the audience through the same changes, never allowing us to understand her too much.

Frederic’s return to his wife, who begins crying unexplainably, is one of the film’s most touching scenes; he hasn’t come home to a cartoon of peaceful family life, but rather to something very rich and complex and, in the end, more attractive, more real even, than Chloe posed in her lovely nakedness. Yet Chloe is completely the soul of the film; again, it feels like Rohmer has not so much created as found the character of Chloe as she is played by Zouzou.

Love — Karoly Malck: A woman whose husband is a political prisoner covers up for his absence in his senile mother’s last days with a series of loving deceptions. Sensitive, perhaps in the extreme, but it ends just at the right moment.

We Won’t Grow Old Together — Maurice Pialat: Jean Yanne as a lovable creep and Marlene Jobert as his persevering girlfriend battle their way through a relationship as exasperating as any I can remember on screen. Were they not both such fine actors, it would be really unbearable; but I still resent being made to feel sorry for Yanne’s piggish lout.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 55.

Summer Soldiers — Hiroshi Teshigahara: A documentary film about American deserters in Japan. At its center is a young, not very political deserter — “I’ve seen too much blood,” he breaks down suddenly while watching I Love Lucy dubbed for Japanese TV — who is hidden by his bar-girl girlfriend and a series of sympathetic Japanese families. Interspersed are scenes with other deserters, several tothe-camera monologues by a passionately committed Puerto Rican deserter, glimpses of the radical underground. Although not entirely successful, the film is full of passing revelations about the encounter of East and West and the many styles of resistance. More human and intelligent than more directly propagandists American works.

Red Psalm — Miklos Jansco: A beautifully filmed revolutionary tract, something like a loose Red Chinese ballet, Red Psalm can be aggravatingly grandiose but somehow never boring. I prefer decadent trash like Play It As It Lays.

A Sense of Loss — Marcel Ophuls: I still don’t know how Ophuls could have made a four-hour documentary about occupied France (The Sorrow and the Pity) so fascinating and then come up with two hours of pedestrian reportage about Northern Ireland. As before, Ophuls shows there are good and stupid people on both sides, but in exploring the terrible consequences of life in a battle zone, he too often resorts to the worst sort of tv news probing. There are flashes of insight but hardly more than you would expect from two hours of Eyewitness News.

Wednesday’s Child — Ken Loach: As others have pointed out, this too is a message film, which makes very clear what is wrong with popular and institutional attitudes toward mental illness. Much of the film is done documentarystyle, allowing for interviews with the principal characters, a teen-aged girl and her parents, and giving it a harrowingly real quality. Although the lessons may be overdrawn, for the first time I understood — on an emotional level — what R. D. Laing means about schizophrenia being a choice to step out of an insane world. Perhaps my defenses were down, but Wednesday’s Child wrapped me up and tore me apart more than anything I’ve seen in a long time.

Reminiscences of a journey to Lithuania — Jonas Mekas; Going Home — Adolfas Mekas: If I’m going to see home movies, I’d rather see people I cared about.

CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE.

Inner Scar — Philippe Garrel: Red Psalm was reported to have only 28 shots (in 88 minutes); this ope has 22, give or take a shot, in 58 minutes. It stars Nico and Pierre Clementi, who is naked throughout. Most of it is boring and ludicrous but several of the images and locations (dream landscapes from all over the world) saved it from being the worst film of the festival, if not the silliest.

Nathalie Granger — Marguerite Duras: This was the worst. The sort of film that, if you step out for a moment, you come back asking not “What happened?” but “Did anything happen?” No, nothing.

Two English Girls (Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent) — Francois Truffaut: In many ways this was the disappointment of the festival. It begs for comparison with Jules and Jim (even “quotes” images) but simply doesn’t have its vitality and perfection — most of all, does not have Jeanne Moreau or anyone with her vibrancy. There are some surprising passages within the film, but generally it is too predictable, too easy.

Bad Company — Robert Benton: One half of the team that wrote Bonnie and Clyde in his first directorial effort and not bad at all. Following a gang of young ruffians headed West when it was still a frontier of sorts is a neat way to get into exploring America’s childhood and Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown are fine in the lead roles, but it’s another film that leaves your head as soon as you leave the theatre. And never returns.

Merchant of Four Seasons — Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Everyone in this German film is despicable in one way or another and I hated it a lot.

L’Amour Fou — Jacques Rivette: A more than four hour film made in 1968, L’Amour Fou comes to us trailing phrases like “legendary masterpiece.” The disintegration of a relationship between a director and his actress wife leading to a mutual descent into madness, is alternated with verite footage of the director rehearsing his play, discussing it with the actors and with the directors of a documentary about the play-in-progress (whose material becomes a film-within-a-film). The device is an ambitious but belabored one. This is one of the three or four films here that deserves several pages to itself, but I found it almost unbearably boring. Someone described it as the last of the New Wave. The mad scenes were particularly unconvincing and I couldn’t wait to get out, but it’s one of the few festival films that’s continued to grow in my mind and, should you care to subject yourself to something so demanding, L’Amour Fou is worth checking out.

Tout Va Bien — Jean-Pierre Gorin & Jean-Luc Godard: Godard’s most accessible, entertaining film in years is very much a return to the feeling of La Chinoise: politically engage, but struggling for a more perfect commitment. There is a scene in an enormous supermarket which involves three continuous pans back and forth in front of the check-out counters that is one of Godard’s most magnificent set pieces outside the backed-up traffic sequence in Weekend. But the film ends with a title on the screen: “This is a film for those who still need one” which implies Godard & Gorin think we should have gotten over all this childishness by now. Fuck ’em. I still need one and I’m glad they condescended to give us one. Tout Va Bien was accompanied by a 45minute film called Letter to Jane that was an exasperating exercise in radical thought but deserves more serious discussion than I have space for here.

Heat — Paul Morrissey: No matter how much fun the movie is, I can’t help thinking Morrissey is destroying the Warhol film by bringing in people who can act. Part of the excitement of the Warhol style was the psychodrama quality of the acting; I mean, even if Brigid Polk was “acting,” she was still very much Brigid Polk recreating herself spontaneously right before our eyes. But Sylvia Miles is acting and I can see that anywhere. She is funny and clever and perfect in the role of a Hollywood has-been throwing herself away over sexy young former tv star and hopeful rock singer Joe Dallesandro. But it’s like seeing a great commercial illustrator down in the middle of a kindergarten drawing class — he may have the technique down beautifully, but the kids are really expressing themselves.

Images — Robert Altman: An involving but not altogether convincing psychological thriller from the director of M*A *S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Susannah York plays a woman tormented by the very real visions of lovers from her past until she begfns killing them off one by one. Of course she goes one too far and it isn’t simply all in her mind anymore, but it’s all so stylishly done you can hardly resist.

The Assassination of Trotsky — Joseph Losey: Richard Burton as Trotsky exiled in Mexico, Alain Delon as his totally weird assassin and Romy Schneider as the unwitting liason. So waddya expect? In spite of the fact that Losey claims complete historical accuracy — as far as that is possible in this apparently still mysterious event — even to the point of taking most of Burton’s dialogue from Trotsky’s writings and speeches, the film is unbelievable. The dialogue is stilted and theatrical, especially Burton’s, and some of the symbolic imagery is just embarassing. Without redeeming qualities.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — Luis Bunuel: Ah! but this one is wonderful. It’s something of a return to abandoned surrealism, with so many episodes resolving themselves as dreams (and dreams-within-dreams) that they seem to be the form of the film. The subject is the bourgeoisie, represented by six characters who are always in the process of sitting down to a dinner which they never get to eat. Bunuel delights in revealing the emptiness and hypocrisy beneath their charm but even more than that he seems to enjoy the openness of the format he’s chosen and stuffs the film with bizarre bits and pieces. The group goes to a dinner party, discovers all the food is fake, then discovers itself on stage not even knowing what lines to speak. At the police station, a student is tortured by being put into a grand piano; roaches begin crawling out over the keys. As the six friends are being seated for yet another dinner party, the cavalry arrive for maneuvers, then stand around passing joints and discussing marijuana. I don’t agree that this is one of the best films of the past few years — it’s throwaway Bunuel but so clearly the work of a master it put nearly everything else at the festival to shame.