CINEMA
Accident prone
PENELOPE HOUSTON
The Boy (Academy Two, 'A') Julius Caesar (Leicester Square Theatre, `U') The Secret of Santa Vittoria (Odeon, Leicester Square, 'A') The Boy is too strange a story not to be true, and in fact the real incident made Japanese headlines some four years ago. A middle-aged man with a small-time criminal record, his wife, and two young children were tracked down by the police after a weird, wandering period during which first the wife and later the elder (ten year old) child earned the family living by posing as accident victims, flinging themselves in the way of cars, faking or sustaining small in- juries, and claiming damages from dis- tracted, police-shy motorists. It is so authen- tically barmy an episode from the motorised lunatic asylum, so fringed around with multiple ironies, and so enticingly filmic, that it could almost be set as an exercise for movie-makers. One can imagine the shifting of blames, guilts and social re- sponsibilities as developed in half-a-dozen different hands. What would Ken Loach, whose Kes is now breaking house records at both other Academies, do with it? Or Francois Truffaut?
Nagisa Oshima, director of the far less accessible but not absolutely dissimilar Diary of a Shin juku Thief, takes the child's eye view, but with a few flickerings of a European sensibility. The boy is a wary, solitary, slit-eyed little stoic, a space age child whose dreams are of just men from other planets; but in his Japanese school uniform, looking like a deferential page-boy from some long-lost hotel, he's also a tradi- tional good son in a shabby family. He has escape routes into trusted fantasy; in one extraordinary scene he tries to run away altogether, back into a settled past with his grandmother. His train ticket .only takes him a fraction of the way, to a deserted beach by night, where he chats with the imagined reassuring presence before compos- ing himself tidily to sleep. In the next scene, in one of the film's many effects of swift, unbalancing dislocation, he's back with his family, the infant breadwinner pursuing his strange traffic on the street corner.
The family are constantly on the move: the shiftless, explosive father, the sympa- thetically muddled (and very European- looking) step-mother, the uncomprehending toddler and all too comprehending ten year old, dragging around a world of snack-bars, cheap new hotels, a Japan we've hardly seen before on the screen. All the street corners look like the same corner; as in Bresson's Pickpocket (Oshima is a director whose films seem to invite French comparisons) the nervous, practised ritual of deception becomes a mad compulsion. Even when the father is no longer driving them, the step- mother and child simply can't stop. 'We did it again last night,' they say with a sort of deranged pride. And again as in Pickpocket, there is a feeling that these ambiguous encounters with their victims have become their only contact with a real, outside world.
Oshima's use of the wide screen is brilliantly calculated. The streets are ordin- ary, the colours bright and clean, the film- ing plainly observant; yet everything seems to be pushed a little to one side, the actors placed off-centre, the camera pulled back to watch from a distance, the whole effect .oblique and unsettling. The trio are nervous predators but they are also a pretty ordin- ary, bewildered family going through a kind of twisted pilgrimage. A social emphasis is plain from the start, when the film's credits come up on a Japanese flag with an angrily blacked-out sun. But the boy's experience of guilt (by way of a genuine and wholly accidental accident in which a child dies) comes at him from another direction altogether; the contrast, in a sort of Japanese-Greene theology, not between
right and wrong but between the public and private conscience. He builds a snowman shrine, plants the dead child's red boot on it, like a blinding symbol of infant guilt, and then ferociously pushes it to pieces: the just men from outer space are not, after all, on their way. It is only at this final point that The Boy switches into the flat police dossier detail of the real life story: a beautifully timed reminder, after so much ambiguity, of the essential guilelessness of public punishment.
It is a pity for Stuart Burge's new Julius Caesar that Shakespeare lacked the fore-
thought to keep Caesar alive for another act or so. John Gielgud's taut, rather fret- ful senior corrimon room dictator, a marble profile with a twitch of apprehension about the eyes, is so much the picture's trump card that it can't afford to throw him away so soon on the losing trick of a bloodied, grunting assassination. Otherwise, Charlton Heston's Antony makes a serviceable demagogue, Enoch Powell in a toga, while Jason Robards' true-blue Brutus seems as flat as though the character had been rolled out on an ironing-board. The Roman
citizenry yelp stereophonically from all quarters of the theatre; the all-star cast
(Robert Vaughn, Richard Johnson, Richard Chamberlain, Diana Rigg) deploy them- selves in attitudes which may look livelier on the colour TV for which Caesar is no doubt ultimately destined; and the adaptation advances in a somewhat halting fashion towards Philippi, occasionally looking as though it had it in mind to stop and ask the way.
The Secret of Santa Vittoria works up a tremendous amount of antiquated pother
and hullabaloo about the endeavours of an Italian village to conceal a million bottles of wine from the Germans, who for some none too accountable reason seem to want it for their war effort. Anna Magnani and Anthony Quinn bawl away at each other across the piazza, secure in their ageing exuberance.
But for the most part Stanley Kramer's picture looks like one of those old Ealing anecdotes about anti-bureaucratic cheek (William Rose, who wrote the script with Ben Maddow, is actually an Ealing old boy) which has dozed off for twenty years and woken up in an age of mass inflation.
The arteries are creaking, the reflexes slow, the whole thing is a manufactured storm in a Cinzano bottle. Will audiences lap it up, as they probably would have done in the 1950s?
Previous page
