5 FEBRUARY 1977, Page 26

Adolescent anglophobia

Clancy Sigel

A Nous les pelites anglaises (EMI International, Bloomsbury) Number Two (The Other Cinema) White Rock (ABC, Shaftesbury Avenue) A few more pictures like A NOUS les petites anglaises (AA certificate) would torpedo the British-French alliance for good. Yet this fake-bittersweet exercise in sexual nostalgia actually masquerades as an affectionate love letter—to the boneheaded, rather ugly English from their wise, beautiful cousins across the Channel. I didn't believe a word of it. Not only because of its shaky time sense —in 1959 Coca-Cola costs three shillings, and the principal actors are decked out in Bill Haley-era gear while the extras wear 1976 clothes—but because of its boorish, narcissistic emotions.

A Nous les petites anglaises has been smash box-office in France. On the surface, it is a slick, self-flattering look back at the puppy loves of two middle-class seventeenyear-old Parisian students let loose among the wide-skirted, pimpled adolescents in a smirking caricature of a typical English seaside resort. Much of the film is taken up with the amorous beach parties and clutchyclutchy disco pairings of the French student colony—a kind of Gidget Goes, to Ramsgate, dripping with a quality of sentimental self-importance which only the Gauls seem to regard as attractive. I'm sure it is intended to convey the awkward charm of French youth in the first flush of sexual awakening; it made me grit my teeth in silent rage at the unconscious cruelty and conceit of all concerned, not least the film-makers. (The story has the feel of someone's intensely personal reminiscence.) Where the picture labours to weave a diaphanous web of teenage jealousies and flirtations, a la Colette, I saw only boring egotism and total insensitivity.

The true spiritual sin, according to this picture, is to be ugly. Most of the French girls are comely and cute; all the English girls are duds. Even the vaguely pretty ones are podgy and characterless. (There is an unkind caricature of the student-nurse daughter of the family one of the boys is staying with. Slavering, she pursues him to the French disco where one of his mates obligingly helps out by dancing body-to-body with her—with a Coke bottle stuck down his mod trousers to simulate erection. Ho ho.)

We are meant to laugh, a bit scornfully, at the domestic scenes of the boozy, blancmange-eating, naïvely over-friendly English families with whom the boys are boarding to improve their English. Instead, I was quite touched. The hosts do indeed look quaintly foolish as they lay out the welcome mat too hard. Myself, I'd have booted out these in sufferably superior lads (who contemptuously shoplift as well as snigger behind the backs of the locals) long before the summer ended.

In an otherwise soppy, self-opinionated film there is one brief scene I must point out. One of the French boys is dancing in a Ramsgate palais with a local girl when her resentful teddy boy friend slaps her face. Director Michel Lang stages the ensuing melee with rare exactitude. It's a short, brilliant piece of direction.

Justifiably, Jean-Luc Godard's Number Two (X certificate) will break no box-office records. Watching its split-screen, multiimage, wild sound-tracked lecture on the destructive effects of capitalism is like being cooped up in a small, locked train compartment with a garrulous French Maoist intellectual. One is fascinated, even awed, by the nimble pyrotechnics of his argument, the supremely confident air of dropping commonplaces with the assurance of a Voltaire. But they are commonplaces. We have heard them before from Godard, more wittily and coherently in films like MasculineFeminine. Sadly, destructuring and random fragmentation seem to have congealed in Godard's work into a dogma.

As so often happens with the French, the essential premise of Number Two—the title refers to both women's place in society and the heroine's chronic constipation (and no doubt Godard's bleak view of life in general) —is simple, if not simple-minded. It examines the social and psychological forces at work on a family of three generationsgrandparen s, parents and children—in a household where the husband is impotent because he goes out to work and the wife is blocked up because she doesn't. It's a weak peg to hang a film on, so Godard indulges in some very fancy technical razzle-dazzle— the sort that you're proud of having managed to decipher. The trouble is, 'the impossibility of male-female relations in industrial society' (according to the synopsis) has become the film-intelligentsia's equivalent of Love Story, and turns out just as kitschy.

But, as in A Nous les petites anglaises, there is one scene in Number Two which gets under the skin. The camera (for a change) stays on the grandfather, an old Communist, who is reminiscing about a political mission to Argentina which he and a comrade embarked on in the 1930s. En route their ship had to dock at a Chinese port for repairs, and the two Cmmunists, armed with leaflets, rented the only available vehicle, a luxury limousine, for a quick tour. When the ship's whistle abruptly blew, they raced back to the quayside throwing out leaflets along the way so that they could get back on board unencumbered by illegal propaganda. Now, forty years later, the tired, disillusioned grandfather wonders: whatever did those illiterate Chinese workers make of revolutionary leaflets written in Spanish flung at them from the open window of a RollsRoyce? This sadly funny shaggy dog story is vivid and concrete in a way the rest of Number Two is not.

White Rock (U certificate), the official film of the X I Ith Winter Olympic Games at Innsbruck, is also screwed up with technique. It is a 'film experience' shot in Panavision anamorphic format (how's that?) with four-track stereophonic sound, and is a loud, silly and pretentious homage to snowbound macho. Narrator James Coburn hokily salutes the ski jumpers: 'Yours is not a jump for glory. It's a jump for joy.' And similar kerfuifie mainly dwelling on the 'moment of truth' each of the winter sports is supposed to symbolise. Coburn bobsleds down a `five million dollar computer-controlled refrigerated tube' to tell us how risky it is; cameras are nailed on to skis to give the illusion of danger at seventy mph. And Rick Wakeman's Percussive music score (keyboard plus Choir of St Paul's Cathedral) makes certain we Pe more attention to his sound than to the athletes. I love the Olympic Games but, on evidence of what Riefenstahl, Ichikawa and Lelouch have done to them, maybe film-makers should swear off for a while. It seems to bring out the sickly romantic bully in even the most talented. Though tinged with the same super-hero muzz, Herzog's more modest but gripping The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner is better value for money. 0.11 the same bill with White Rock is Genesis (U certificate) in concert. It, too, is verylogd'