CINEMA
Decorated style
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Laughter in the Dark (London Pavilion, 'X') One thing must be said for Tony Richard- son: you never know where you are with him. Two films ago, it was Jeanne Moreau cruising the Mediterranean in search of a mythical lost lover; then the Crimean War; currently Mick Jagger as Ned Kelly, the tin- masked Australian bandit. In between, he sandwiched his Roundhouse Hamlet and the film we are now seeing, an adaptation by Edward Bond of Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in. the Dark. Perhaps the best thing about Laughter in the Dark is that it sends one straight to the book.
It is, though, a backhanded kind of grati- tude. One might not react quite so wincingly to some of the rougher, strayer Richardson-Bond effects if one hadn't in mind the irresistible finesse, the dry and fastidious ironies, of Nabokov's cat-like original. Everything in the film becomes a little grander, fluffier, and unforgivably vaguer. Albinus, the staid Berliner, is now Sir Edward More, rich London art dealer of the 1960s, much encumbered with stately homes. He is still cowed and solemn (not perhaps Nicol Williamson's best line), but able at the drop of the director's hat to assemble around himself a whole swinging, not to say dripping, party. Margot (Anna Karina) flashes her usherette's torch in a cinema which is on the outside very ob- viously the Curzon and on the inside the National Film Theatre. And neither estab- lishment, one suspects, would encourage such flouncing with a Lyons ice-cream tray.
So, however, it goes: it even takes an entire bicycle race, no longer a couple of cyclists, to bring about the car crash that delivers Sir Edward, blinded, into the hands of his tormentors. The early part of the film moves fitfully and snatchingly through the story: the art dealer's infatuation with his sullen Lolita, the break with his family (the consternation this causes surely needs be- neath it the inflexible social foundations that barely exist in the film's London), and the reappearance, here with the ostenta- tiously devilish gesture of setting fire to his host's curtains, of Margot's former lover. Things steady down in the last scenes. when the blind man stumbles around his rented villa, mercilessly goaded by the un- seen and almost unsuspected mosquito pre- sence of the third person in their menage a trois. Nabokov's infernal machine gener- ates grotesque force; and like most other things in the book, it is irresistibly cine- matic.
The appeal of the novel is its total lucid- ity: snow in Berlin, and Southern sunshine, and everyone exactly in his place as the traps click shut. But by denying Margot and her lover (played by Jean-Claude Drouot as any cynical movie Frenchman) most of their background, the film reduces itself to an ingenious, slightly daft mechan- ism. Some of its effects are not bad: snatches of English embarrassment at social blunders, the girl water-skier mumbling through a dribbling mouthful of ice the words that end Sir Edward's dream, Nicol Williamson's last efforts to see beyond his blindness. And characteristically these are the most direct moments; not the bits when Tony Richardson, obviously trying to match Nabokov's mirror-image style, keep, reflecting Nicol Williamson in every avail- able surface.
Actually, the book is fascinatingly clut- tered with movie references: not only Mar- got's sulky dream of stardom as she stands trailing her torch and watching Garbo. or Albinus's idea of cartoon art films, but the conscious cinematic elisions and focus- changes in the writing. 'Stage directions for last silent scene,' Nabokov says at the end: and places it in a paragraph as immaculate as an icicle. But it's not enough for the filth, which has to barge about a dark cellar, with bullets slamming into wine-bar- rels. Nabokov's last shot is a fine piece of 1960's cinema, in colour; it is the updated film that ends frantically, with a dive into the 1930s,
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