CINEMA
Old waves
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
Talk of Godard, Chabrol, Malle, Resnais, Truffaut et al as still part of a nouvelle vague in French cinema is as common and irritating as references to angry young men in the British theatre. There was a time when natural interior shots, apparent improvisation, and a copy of Cahiers du Cinema opened carelessly on a stained coffee table, really did mean something new. But the wave has long since broken, and the latest films of Resnais and Truffaut to reach London suggest that if there is original work being done in the cinema •in France it is being done elsewhere.
Resnais's Je t'Aime, Je t'Aime (' A ' Paris-Pullman) is an account of a morbid • and excessively self-questioning love affair between an extraordinarily cultivated shipping clerk and a very beautiful girl (Olga Georges-Picot). She figures briefly as a secretary, and commends herself to his attention by her sensitive refusal to stick letters in envelopes. Our interest in the development of this relationship is distracted by a time machine into which the unfortunate shipping clerk is placed, after a suicide attempt at the beginning of the film, to relive physically a moment out of his past life. Aware of his role as a guinea : pig in a scientific experiment, he naturally chooses to prolong his memories. The love affair ensues and the experiment is severely jeopardised.
Resnais has always been fascinated by time effects in the cinema — the filming of something once and for all in time past which is continually time present on the screen — as he showed in those scriptural texts for the modern cinema. Hiroshima .: Mon Amour and L'Annee Derniere Marienbad. But Je t'Aime wraps up the ideas so artificially that it becomes impossible to sustain interest either in the love affair or in the deeper issues behind it.
• It is a stale film: and exactly the same criticism can be levelled at Truffaut's Bed • and Board ('A' Cameo-Poly). This is the most recent of the mock mock-heroic adventures through life of Jean-Pierre Laud (here with a wife, a child and an inscrutable Japanese mistress) whose childhood roles Truffaut based on his own life to some extent, but who seems to have become more of a fantasy figure since his ap • pearance in Stolen Kisses. There is still the • gentle wit, the sly glances at French middle-class life and the humanitarianism, for want of a better word, which Truffaut's films have always contained. But now it is less sharply-defined; the wit has less edge. A kind observer would say that Truffaut is rounding off a series as best he can; an honest one, that Bed and Board is a tired rehash of old themes. Among the rest of the week's films, Escape from the Planet of the Apes ('U' Odeon, Leicester Square) is better than its predecessor and nearly as good as The Planet of the Apes — mostly because of the fine acting of Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter as the two highly intelligent apes who travel back in time from their exploding planet and arrive, at their peril, in the present day. The ploy of our ape ancestors transformed into clever animals from the future is once again oddly effective, and the script exploits the comparisons with tact and subtlety.
Le Mans (' U ' Odeon, Marble Arch) is Grand Prix re-run for those who prefer Steve McQueen to Paul Newman. There is no story to speak of, but the documentary detail is good and the wheel-shots taken at speed on the circuit will excite anyone who can't get to Battersea Funfair. Cold Turkey ('A' London Pavilion) is an amiable comedy about Dick Van Dyke's attempts to persuade a small American town to give up smoking and win money. Finally, to the New Victoria comes a very entertaining double bill of horror films. The Beast in the Cellar (' X ') has two elderly sisters living alone, probably, in an area in which savage, inhuman attacks are being made on soldiers from nearby barracks. James Kelly's first-rate script allows the tension to build up consistently and gives Flora Robson and Beryl Reid scope for some genuine acting. Blood on Satan's Claw ('X') is your run-of-the-mill mediaeval hodge-podge of witchcraft, superstition, clawed hands coming up from under the floorboards, Linda Hayden warbling spells in the compulsory thin white shift, and Patrick Wymark and James Hayter setting out grimly with crucifixes through the dripping woods.
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