CINEMA
Bridging the generation gap
CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON
For one reason or another, a good many distinguished foreign film directors sooner or later get round to making a film in English: and to their admirers in the English-speaking countries the result is always peculiarly fascinating. Will the gnomic enigmas of Monsieur X stand revealed as so much wind? And it could be that the bizarre visual extravaganzas of Senor Y will be fatally undermined by the operatic absurdities of his dialogue? In the case of Milos Forman's new film Taking Off (' X,' Odeon, St. Martin's Lane) no such disappointment is in store. The qualities which made his films (and those of other Czech directors who emerged in the early 'sixties) so attractive, the ability to exploit comically and quite mercilessly but without the slightest malice people's foibles and pomposities, and his obvious, quite unsentimental affection foi the hopeless inadequacies of his baffled characters are still in evidence, and there are more specific Parallels with his earlier work, as for instance the rock musical auditions which recall the beauty contest in The Firemen's Ball and the plump commercial traveller on the make who summons up the sex-starved soldiers of A Blonde In Love.
The story, inasmuch as there is one, Concerns a teenaged girl, Jeannie Tine (Linnea Heacock), who runs away from home to audition for a rock musical, and her distraught parents' ineffectual attempts to find her until she finally comes home of her own accord at the most inopportune Possible moment. The film is a series of More or less hilarious set-pieces — a hYpnosis smoking-cure, a meeting of the Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children (where in an attempt to understand their children the parents earnestly 'turn on' under the direction of a hired freak), a drunkenly hysterical game of middle-aged strip-poker. Lynn Carlin and Buck Henry are excellent as the parents, especially the latter, whose glazed, timid smile is his response to everyone, from the Negro who mistakes his anti-smoking exercise for a Black Power salute, to his daughter's hairy boy!end who modestly admits that his income is 290,000 dollars a year (before tax). For me the highspot comes when Mrs Tine's friend Margot (Georgia Engel) coyly describes the astonishing virility and quaint sexual tastes of her extraordinarily mild-looking husband. But the film is constantly moving as well as funny, and the audience I saw it with, an audience of real people (as opposed to critics), seemed as delighted as I was with its mixture of informality and stylishness. Style, or at any rate consistency, is the quality most lacking in Woody Allen's film Bananas (' AA,' Prince Charles Theatre). Lurching uneasily from satire to parody to surrealistic farce, it's a breathless guided tour of comic modes and is as erratic in its effectiveness as it is in its lines of approach. It opens brilliantly with a sports-commentary presentation of a political assassination in Latin America (the commentator heaving powerfully through the crowd to interview the 'dying President) and carries on almost as well with a few scenes establishing the woefully neurotic New York life of our hero Fielding Mellish (Woody Allen). However, the meat of the film, in which Mellish sets off to the Latin American state of San Marcos, joins the guerrillas, and ultimately becomes the reluctant President is a good deal less successful. A very funny trial scene (in which Mellish cross-examines himself and a large black lady turns out to be J. Edgar Hoover) finally revives matters somewhat, but the ultimate impression is inevitably rather hit-and-miss. The best scenes in the film are those between Mellish and his painfully earnest girl-friend Nancy (Louise Lasser): "Not the actual Ching," heh answers, agonised, when she asks him if he has read the 1-Ching, "but I've dabbled in Kierkegaard." And it's hard not to like a film which contains a scene as funny as the one in which a harassed interpreter painstakingly, but with a poor accent, repeats the conversation of two men who are talking to each other in English.
It was a week of comedies, but I was fortunately able to escape those mysterious ailments, tickled ribs, aching or even split sides and the various forms of asphyxiation reviewers often freely confess to. In fact, I wasn't even able to follow the elementary instruction contained in the title of Laugh With Max Linder (' U,' ICA Young Cinema, 3 pm, weekends), no matter what merry japes the cheeky chappie got up to. I've always been stonily resistant to the attractions of silent comedy, and although the film is well put together and mercifully free from those abysmal commentaries that often disfigure compilation films (" My, my, what are Stan and Oily up to now?"), and although Max (who looks like a diminutive and slightly less demented version of Enoch Powell) goes through a number of classic routines (fighting an imaginary rival to impress his girl-friend, shaving in front of a mirror that isn't there, casually taking on half-a-dozen rivals as a musketeer), I hardly cracked a smile. I admired and liked Max Linder, but I can't say I was able to enjoy him very much.
More, however, than the latest old warhorse from the Disney stable, Scandalous John (` U,' Odeon, Leicester Square), in which the reliable Brian Keith, all gums and whiskers, squeezes all he can from the role of an aged Don Quixote of the West, who sets off with a Mexican cowhand as his Sancho Panza (Alfonso Arau) to deliver his herd (which consists of one elderly steer) and so realize (he imagines) enough capital to buy off his mortgage and thwart the wicked landowner. As long as the film sticks to its Quixote theme, it's tolerable enough, and Keith, finding a slipper in a wayside rubbish dump or grumpily dismissing a huge modern city as a mirage, manages to inject some pathos and humour into the film. But it's slowed down by a turgid love sub-plot and a great deal of "He believes in what he's doing and that's more than can be said for most of us." Needless to say the old coyote is gunned down from behind by a yellow-bellied rattlesnake before we know where we are, and there's a final image of him cantering off to that great ranch-house in the sky. Finally, Daughters of Darkness ('X,' Cameo Victoria) is a perfectly ludicrous horror film in which Delphine Seyrig is a lesbian vampire, who, in a vast hotel in Ostend, which seems to have a guestlist of four and a staff of one, gets her girl-friend to seduce a young newly-wed bridegroom the quiet) so that she can make off with the bride. They all spend a great deal of time discussing evil in a rather dreary way and disposing of each other's bodies.
Playwright Christopher Hampton (author of 'The Philanthropist ') will be writing on the cinema in these pages while our Christopher Hudson is on holiday.
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