CINEMA
Swedish Eden
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Elvira Madigan (Academy One, 'A') Vivre pour Vivre (Cameo Poly and Cameo Vi, toria, 'X') A Dandy in Aspic (Columbia, 'A') In Sweden, around 1890, a young cavalry officer wrecks his career to run off with a tight- rope dancer, abandoning wife and children, cheerfully ripping the gold buttons off his ser- vice tunic and replacing them with a civilian set symbolically lifted from a scarecrow. He and Elvira, his beautiful funambulist, enjo-y a brief, doomed, incognito idyll, a birdlike. improvident summer pair, flitting lackadaisi- ally from rich hotel to cheap lodging. Ewn- tually, inevitably, he kills her and then him- self—two shots echoing over a silent field, di, turbing only the butterflies. This true story, which apparently won is star-crossed pair a lasting place in Swed..sh folklore, is all there is to Elvira Madigan and enough. In a happy distinction its director, Bo Widerberg, describes Elvira as a 'film Om' —in contrast to his next. which will be abort a historic strike broken by the army, and his earlier Raven's End, a very solid, period piece about a writer's coming of age. 'Om alms,' by .Widerberg's engaging definition, arc those where everything' depends more on how
• than on what, where the director can't duck for cover behind his theme. He is out in the open, alone in this case with what could be a perilously unfashionable essay in high roman- ticism. Widerberg, with tact, precision and one might guess a shrewd sense of his own' temperamental limitations, doesn't take it too high. Elvira Madigan is a rarely beautiful film. 14 is also a singularly uncloying one.
A plain little factual note tells us the end of the story at the beginning: from that point, it is really for the director to keep us from being too lugubriously aware that this is a progression towards a suicide pact. And in any case, Elvira is no Mayerling, and it would serve no purpose at all to show Count Sixten and Elvira as a symbolically fated couple, representative of anything outside themselves. Widerberg plays his film as a drifting but pre- ordained duet: the flight from society has been made before it starts, and this vulnerable summer is a parenthesis between a decision and its consequence. The lovers chase butterflies, wolf wild raspberries and thick cream, are be- friended by a fat, romantic cook. All their meals seem to be picnics; and in a scene which concentrates the whole mood of isolation, gravity and sunlight, Elvira hitches up her primrose yellow dress and practises her craft on a clothes-line purloined from the hotel garden.
This is exquisite, marvellously shot by Jorgen Persson, and also characteristic of the film's agreeable reluctance to drench its lovers in scented melancholy. Elvira (Pia Degermark) and Sixten (Thommy Berggren) are surrounded by every prop of nature and painterly contri- vance: sun-filtered woodland, flat, oily, colour- drained sea, horses cantering across sand- dunes, children blowing at dandelions, the bottle of claret ominously spilling out across the knife on the alfresco tablecloth. But Widerberg lets these country splendours work fractionally more on his audience than on his characters, who still miss other worlds and re- treat into unshared pleasures. Finally the pic- nics are over, and they grub around the fields chewing at roots and berries, romantics at the end of a practical road. It is this slight but just perceptible critical element and the delicacy of the director's commitment to his characters, which keeps Widerberg's film from going soft and sticky at the edges. This is the romanti- cism of bread and cheese and Mozart and sun- light: unaffected, durable, crammed with honest artifice.
Claude Lelouch is telling much the same old story in Vivre pour Vivre, in the 1968 pre- packaged version, the sort of film you feel ought .to be sold with trading stamps. No one commits suicide in Lelouch's film; but no one has much fun either, as the hero, a French television reporter, finds himself manoeuvred into leaving his semi-estranged wife for a bouncing American model. Jet-set love is con- summated on safari in Uganda; a second honeymoon means cultural tramps round the Amsterdam galleries and misty dawdling on Van Gogh bridges; sadness and wiseness come with a brief stretch as a Vietcong prisoner; and the reconciliation with the wife finds her, still glazedly smiling, consoling herself on the ski slopes in gold trousers and mink wind- cheater.
Lelouch's Un Homme et une Femtne was
pre-sold cinema, all right, but its advertising- man's dreams wove themselves around nothing more significant than a pretty couple, a Ford Mustang and the beach at Deauville. It is enormously lowering to watch the same ob- sessive camera-consciousness, the same clutter of cars and clothes, all mixed up with the frail- est and showiest delusions of social signifi- cance. The art-conscious sequences in Amster- dam are bad enough; the model's resolutions to reintegrate herself into American life ('I will meet Buffalo Bill in a taxi') are worse. But they don't approach the awfulness of our hero at work, running through movie sequences of nazi parades from Triumph of the Will, con- ducting momentously trivial interviews with COngo mercenaries or turning the Vietnam war into a Technicolor elegy.
Lelouch films rather as Ian Fleming wrote: cars and meals and brand names and expen- sive aotion. But his lacquered people— here Yves Montand as the haggard reporter, Annie Girardot as wife and Candice Bergen as model—survive only in a world where Air France serves the best in-flight snacks, and thirteen flash shots of a girl in profile, one after another, seem to call out for a hair shampoo caption, and you're never alone with a Gauloise. To let Vietnam and so on infiltrate into all this is worse than vulgar; it's very nearly suicidal.
A Dandy in Aspic, as written by Derek Marlowe, was a mannered but intelligent trip around the inner circle of the spy game. As directed by Anthony Mann (his last film, still uncompleted when he died last year), and dis- appointingly scripted by Mr Marlowe, it's just a corkscrew plot attached to some inertly flashy filming and the sort of sour dialogue that actors can best speak with their faces screwed up. Laur- ence Harvey, Tom Courtenay and the minuscule Mia Farrow star, trailing around the Embank- ment, the Berlin Wall, airports, shooting gal- leries, and all those other spy-crowded locations.
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