For another example: At the end of the film, Nicholson is again faced with a crisis: he is now alienated from both his bequeathed identity (gifted pianist) and his assumed one (oil rigger cum sumbitch). The moment is poignant enough, but the response of theprotagonist of Five Easy Pieces is only a depressingly immature reassertion of character consistency-he blows town. When what is desperately needed is a fresh way to look at something, we are given something to look at. Apocalyptic world-views are fashionable, and it's a respectable ambition to depict what it is that drives us to the brink. But artistry demands something more, a quality which separates images from visions. Five Easy Pieces is only a photograph of an attitude; its weakness is a reliance on a single, unhelpful, and finally depressing point of view.
PART OF THE brilliance of Le Boucher, Claude Chabrol's newest film, is the complexity which glides beneath the surface of a clean, moving, and beautifully liquid story. We know a man is guilty of murder, we know he loves a woman, and we know the woman loves him. Those discoveries are usually the fruit of stories, not their premises. But Chabrol uses evil, and love, and sexual repression as building blocks. He explores the concepts of emotional isolation and delayed gratification with a maturity rarely seen in conventional murder mysteries.
Because Le Boucher is primarily a narrative, because it moves from scene to scene discretely, with visible growths and amplifications, its realism conveys an almost anthropological charm. The story makes an explicit link between the drives and aspirations of the Cro-Magnon man and the diverted energies of us, his descendants. Sublimation, murder, and love are three traditionally heavy themes, and the fact that Chabrol sets them in a narrative (rather than historical, or surrealistic, or impressionistic) context allows them to assume the same weight that, say, Freudian psychopathology plays in Alice in Wonder-land
Le Boucher is also part documentary. The movie was shot in a French town near the site of the Lascaux caves, and many scenes include glimpses of locals whose faces are ingratiating. Kes, a British film directed by Ken Loach, is also part documentary, and the delicate way in which it mixes overt fiction with pure reportage is admirable. Kes is a kestrel hawk; the bird is caught and trained by a 15-year-old boy, and the movie is as much about freedom and repression than anything else. The boy is the no-good-nick of his class at school; the standard target of vicious schoolboy bullying, his mother and brother also treat him like a Yorkshire Dennis the Menace. The scenes at school-a football game, a career-placement interview, a dreary assembly-are astoundingly authentic, and the documentary aspect of the film makes it apparent that this landscape is the source material for If Kes is a bit cloying, but it's also very good.
DOCUMENTARIES can also be embarrassing, and Street Scenes 1970 was the stickiest red herring at the Festival. The film is a record of what occurred in New York after last May's strike (including some footage of the celebrated hard-hat incidents), and it also covers the march on Washington. That the photography and sound are of markedly poor quality, that the editing resorts to tricks (unspeakable in documentaries) like pixillation, and that the whole affair is packaged like a landmark of cinema verite, all pale before the movie's ugliest flaw: its politics are asinine. The interviewers are boorish, sexist, and reactionary, and the resulting sub-screen attitudes toward militancy, electoral politics, and violent revolution which emerge are at their very best a parody of post-teenybopper politics.
One particularly offensive scene occurs toward the close of the movie. The New York Cinetracts Collective (comprised mainly of a group from N. Y. U.) has completed the job of making the documentary, and it has assembled in a Washington, D. C. hotel room to discuss ( a la Godard and a la God knows who else) the ethics of having made a movie instead of responding to the crisis with political action. As they speak, and as the film's audience squirms in unbearable embarrassment, the moviemakers proceed to be mind-bogglingly male chauvinistic, grossly misguided about aesthetics, and ultimately personally ugly. Street Scenes 1970 was one of the most depressing items at the Festival, especially because it revealed a student consciousness passing as radical and progressive to be dishearteningly, pathetically corrupt.
In Hiroshima, Mon Amour and L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad, Alain Resnais began his explorations of time and space dislocation. His newest film, Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime, is precisely about that dislocation. A man enters a time-machine which looks like a high-school biology model of the human brain: scientists have told him that he will re-live exactly one minute of his life, at a point exactly a year ago. The machine goes berserk, and what follows is a visual montage of the man's past. Time barriers are simply not observed, and jumps from one sequence to the next follow a pattern which dimly emerges as the film proceeds.
It is a fascinating experiment in contemplation. We are privileged to observe pieces of a life, to examine what the concept of "significant experience" actually means. If the story isn't always fascinating, if Resnais' idea of a man's secret self is occasionally pedestrian, the film is still intriguing simply as a glimpse of the manner in which a director chooses to re-pattern the vicissitudes of human experience.
IL CONFORMISTA, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 film, is a brilliant blending of psychological characterization and political action. The central character, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, was the victim of a homosexual assault in his youth. Having developed a consuming need for normalcy, he joins the Fascist party and works as a counter-espionage agent. The lushness, the depravity, and the insanity of pre-war Rome and Paris provide a stunning backdrop for the story ofTrintignant's political, moral, and sexual peregrinations.
Some scenes, like a blue-lit stroll down the Faubourg, like a dance-hall in which two silk-swathed women dance a drunken, passionate tango, like an amphitheatre-like hospital for the mentally ill where the whiteness of the walls is relieved only by the paleness of pallid flesh, are demonically spell-binding. In fact, the succession of images-a giant stone head of Mussolini dragged across a bridge by two motorcycles, the fire-lit nude body of a homosexual eating dead cats amid the ruins of the Forum, Trintignant's eyes-recalls Fellini Satyricon in their bizarre intensity. It's a perverse film, as perverse as Fascism, and that analogy is in many ways the point of the movie.
Bunuel's Tristana, which stars Catherine Dencuve, closed the Festival. The story is reminiscent of Viridinana: a beautiful young girl dressed in black enters the home of her guardian (Fernando Rey, who also played the uncle in Viridiana ); she becomes his mistress, then his wife; she destroys him. Loss of innocence is a favorite Bunuel theme, and Deneuve's progression from blond virgin to black widow is a passionate, nearly religious journey. What most marks the film is the blend of heresy and humanism for which Bunuel is distinguished.
The movie is nearly flawlessly executed, and its emphasis on story and detail makes it much more textured, far more moving, than a film like Five Easy Pieces. Perhaps a comparison of the two movies is unfair; Rafelson is just beginning his career, Bunuel is ending it with years of fully sustained excellence. But because both men are dealing, in the end, with the same kinds of problems-Is a person defined by himself or by his intimates? Is there such a thing as redemption through passion? Does geography have a personality-vindictive, liberating, or purely evil?-it seems appropriate to assess both films in the same context.
Bunuel is an artist, and he knows he's a sinner; Rafelson makes movies, and has a saint's deadly obsession with truth. "What you can, do," goes another Yiddish proverb; "what you have, hold; what you know, keep to yourself."