ARTS Carnival Cannes
PENELOPE HOUSTON
To admit to enjoying the Cannes Film Festival is rather like admitting to enjoying Christmas. It's altogether too much, and some of what it's too much of doesn't seem to be doing anyone any particular good. Bits of it look like the jumble sale of the elec- tronic village. At moments, one's aware of an event confronting the ill-assorted but un- deniable energy of its present with dim memories of real movie stars making traffic- stopping entrances. (Now, of course, the Croisette traffic stops of its own accord, locked in a permanent jam.) Cannes ought, everyone agrees, to be recalled to some clearer sense of exactly what it's there for. Yet because it has the bemused, thrashing vitality of an organism seemingly proceeding nowhere, it does manage to communicate an extraordinary sense of what movies are for the moment about. Critics, rationed addicts of the weekly press show list, need the occasional massive overdose.
Once, there was a strong competitive festival with a limited, intent fringe. Lately, the fringe has been wagging the garment, and the central Festival looks a bit perplexed and over-taxed. Some of the major films (BufWei's Tristana, Bergman's A Passion) come in, rather disdainfully, out of competi- tion. And a festival whose jury can't even consider these class runners is already slightly diminished, like big race betting without the favourite. Several countries were absent this year: the Japanese, who explained with tink- ling scepticism that Cannes had turned down their Osaka film, and the Russians, whose coup had apparently been to block the French from entering L'Aveu, Costa-Gavras' film about the Czech trials of 1952.
In the main Festival cinema, the smooth boulevard capabilities of Claude Sautet's Les Choses de la Vie (love and car smash and actors smoking like chimneys) competed with Otto Preminger's Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, a film like a raddled marsh- mallow, and with painfully outclassed entries from countries like Argentina and Brazil which in the past have exploded bombshells. Genuine, copper-bottomed competitive entries weren't exactly thick on the ground, though the Hungarians kept up their record of producing the film for the occasion. Istvan Gaal's The Falcons is an austere, secretive and compelling piece, about a young man's visit to a ranch where hunting falcons are trained. The trainer expounds a disciplinary philosophy; the marvellous, baleful birds show their cruel paces; gradually, from the atmosphere of isolation and jovial threat, one of those tight-clenched, equivocal allegories of political power emerges. But Gaal's film works not through the interpreta- tions that can be imposed on it, but very directly, visually, an encounter with a hard little outpost obsessed with turning the ruth- less into the efficient.
Elsewhere, the unfailingly resolute can still pursue a simple festival diet of dawn to dusk Pornographic snacks. Seventy per cent of ordinary films are now said to lose money; and it would be intriguing to know whether the stern statistic also applies in this market, and whether it is only the hope of another Am Curious—Yellow, that Gone with the Wind of sex films, that sustains entrepreneurs through dark nights when le film le plus sexy isn't perhaps quite packing them in. For those lusting more purely after cinema, the Quin- zaine des Realisateurs shows eight films a day, sixteen blinding hours, in an atmosphere of restive dedication. Given time and stamina to camp out here, with an audience whose average age, when the lights go up, looks to be about seventeen, one might conceivably get some clearer notion of whether the movie future is going to work.
The underground is thoroughly above- ground: its entrepreneurs can be found deal- ing at the Canton. And meanwhile the old image-makers of Hollywood are putting in such a swift takeover bid for anger and iconoclasm (see The Strawberry Statement and M*A*S*H, both for review next week) that revolutionaries, somewhat given anyway to conspiracy theories, might well be finding evidence of some very deep establishment plot, to make dissent look like the ultimate conformism. The solemn face of the American revolution appeared in Robert Kramer's Ice, shown in the Critics' Week : the New York Jewish intelligentsia, flat- voiced apprehensive and earnest, contemplat- ing a new Vietnam next door in Mexico and plotting armed sorties from their apartment blocks. Flatly made, grey-faced, depressive and unalluring. this is probably a much more authentic document of a sector of the Ameri- can conscience than most of the flash. Rent- a-student looks a sour game this year.
Hard sell, soft sell, or occasional mad sell, a festival is never an occasion for anyone who might still believe that films are found under gooseberry bushes. It is, though, a great time for sorting sheep from goats; and it was perhaps rather more noticeable this year even than usual that almost everything admirable on the screen was having little truck with trends.
Bufluel's Trictana, for instance, comes with all the unperplexed authority of his seventy years: an old man's film (though he actually planned it seven years ago, when the Spanish censors intervened), it's based on a novel by Perez Galdos, sometimes called the Spanish Dickens, about an elderly gentleman, his young ward, and the painter she convention-
ally runs away with-. Finally the girl comes
home again, has a leg amputated (a true tribulation for a Revue] heroine). and stumps so domineeringly about that the old free- thinker is ultimately reduced to doleful after- noons eating chocolates with visiting priests.
The filming is impeccable, swift, amused, reverberating: Bufiuelian. And in Catherine Deneuve's splendidly steely performance, one is again reminded of Butiliel's common ground with Hitchcock—the straits to which they enjoy reducing imperious blondes.
The heroine of Bergman's A Passion also has leg trouble, though the real maladies here are those inevitable corruptions of the soul. Once again we are on Bergman's island; once again, the little circling group from his stock company display and worry at the eternal malaise, while elsewhere on the island someone is savaging the local livestock. A Passion is intractable as only Bergman can be, and in some details oddly awkward. Inter- ludes in which actors advance out of char- acter to make strikingly platitudinous com- ments on their roles seem an unnecessary instance of Bergman's fondness for remind- ing us that we are watching a film—far less telling than his single thundering echo here from the last scene of The Shame. But this fretting, taxing, sometimes glumly beautiful film imposes itself as, for me, The Shame didn't: rather the Vietnam in the Bergman- ian soul than that film's Vietnam in Sweden.
Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher is bound to reach London soon. Hitchcockian in effects (one inspired audacity, when a murder vic- tim is revealed by blood dripping on a bun during a school picnic) but uniquely Cha- brolian in caracter study, it follows Killer! as another riveting scene from French provin- cial life, with murder. Chabrol's still waters are running very strong. Malatesta, a first film by a German Tv director, Peter Lilien- thal, mixes the old newsreels of the Sidney Street Siege into a sympathetically blurred view of anarchists in Edwardian London.
Another first film, Lasse Forsberg's Mimhandlingen, brings a notably wide-open eye to an unpromising subject: the trials of a young Swedish radical who punches a Jaguar driver in the street and ends up strapped to his cot in a mad-house. Clearly this is the only place for him; clearly it is no place for him: Misshandlingen has the wit to hold two ideas in its mind, and ours, and still function. Liliana Cavani's The Cannibals, updating Antigone with unburied corpses littering traffic-jammed Italian streets, is another film which works formidably where one feels it shouldn't: hard intelligence and a sharp, rather freakish visual sense breaking down schematism. In this company, it was encouraging to find great enthusiasm for Ken Loach's Kes; and encouraging that the British Film Producers Association, annexing a corner of the beach for its lions and uni- corns, for once managed to make good inter- national public relations look easy, amiable and unfussed.
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