Cinema
Moral tales and allegories
Christopher Hudson
Two remarkable European films are briefly in London. So many critical bouquets have been flung at Love in the Afternoon ('AA' Berkeley and Galaxy), the last of Eric Rohmer's moral tales, that to fling one more seems like adding compliment to celebration. But it has to be lone. Each of Rohmer's films is about the sentimental re-education of a mature man Who enjoys a stable relationship with a Woman. Another girl comes along, there is a period of disruption while the man is brought face to face with the moral values he has learnt to take for granted, and then the original relationship is renewed and sealed more firmly, with a greater, sometimes sadder, sense of the responsibility it entails. Love in the Afternoon is a lighterhearted, more physical film than Claire's Knee or My Night With Maud. Frederic is a Married man, deeply in love with his wife Helene. His contentment dissatisfies him; he thinks he ought to be more responsive to other women. Into his life comes Chloe, the ex-mistress of one of his old friends. She is bright, sexy, full of warmth and an endearingly frank cynicism. She senses the fortifications thrown up by three years of bourgeois married life and determines to undermine them. Reluctantly, half-laughing, half-stern, Frederic allows himself to take her out to dinner and go strolling With her. At first it is a simple pleasure to counter her provocations, to flirt in the Shadow of immorality. Gradually' the accumulation of shared sentiments provokes desire. What irritated me most was her apparent disregard for my detachment. She was forcing me to be jealous, treating nie like a discarded /over. Chloe does fall in love with him, and Frederic is happy With her. But the feelings of guilt which he has rationalised as an earnest of his token freedom from Helene become real and overmastering when Chloe lies naked in ,hed before him. He goes back to his wife, "Is love for her sharpened by having so nearly betrayed it. This account gives less than most accounts an impression of the film's :quality. It is a simple story and Rohmer is in control of every detail. He knows Chloe and Frederic so intimately that their !oerest gestures ring true to the characters ne has built up. They go on developing, llocreting a human dimension, throughout the story. Rohmer is careful, too, to Provide the minor characters with their own lives. Without swerving from its concentration upon Frederic, at work, the camera manages to record the idiosyncrasies of his secretaries, for whom Frederic is no screen hero. It shows them working, doing their nails, giggling, having long, concentrated phone calls to boyfriends and exchanging meaningful glances when Chloe leaves the office with Frederic. Even in a dinner-party sequence, lasting a matter of seconds, we are presented with snatches of conversation which tell us something about their background. I have retained a certain nostalgia . . . one begins, and another says earnestly, I can't stand avocados. It is one of the few films this year worth re-viewing. The other remarkable European film is Miklos Jancso's Agnus Dei (' X ' Academy Three). It is not his best film, and to anyone who has not seen either The Round-Up or The Red and the White it will no doubt appear wholly mysterious. Its provenance, again, is the period of revolution and counter-revolution in Hungary after the first world war, but this time the story is presented in the form of a mediaeval mystery play. As the history is subordinated to allegory, so the wider significance of the film's images becomes apparent. The entire action is set in a large pasture bounded by a lake, a farmhouse
and an orchard. The camera, in long takes, wheels and circles restlessly about the field. Revolutionaries in uniform shout orders; men in shirt sleeves or black cloaks stride from one small group to another arguing and ranting; the priest, representing the oppressive hegemony of the Church, is allowed to muster the forces of reaction. The revolutionaries ride off on horseback; those left behind are shot and fall to the ground. The collaborators stand silently with bowed heads waiting for their inevitable execution. The revolutionaries return. More victims are chosen, arbitrarily it would appear, are stripped, made to run and shot down. Women are humiliated by both sides. Men march, wheel and defile in front of the camera which records with the same blankness their moments of triumph and their ignominous extinction.
Even the brief episodes of merrymaking have an ironic support. The bands and folk-dancers and tables of food and drink are brought out after a victory of the counter-revolution bent on re-establishing the old feudalism. Such unrelieved gloom might verge open the ludicrous in another director, but Jancso in a compelling way creates an effect of irreversible fate. Men are flies; their life hangs upon the arbitrary whim, not of gods, but of other flies who have a brief authority over them. If there is any logic, it is a logic known to the tyrant and the turncoat, the two men left alive, as the film ends, to travel to new pastures.
If classical tragedy has any counterpart on the screen, Jansco is its purest exponent. Character is subordinate to actions which mould and break it. Partial men succeed in bringing down impartial fate upon their heads. The stylised setting is matched by the stylised movements of cameras and actors. It is a beautiful and disturbing choreography, which helps create the sense ihat everything has been pre-arranged. No wonder Agnus Del is a difficult film. It refuses to allow us the comfort of a single, satisfactory interpretation.
An amusing contrast between the Old world and the New is provided by Gold (` X ' Classic Piccadilly), a semi-underground 'satirical comedy' about the American way of life. Jancso has said that he uses naked women in his films as a symbol of oppression. Ronan O'Rahilly, the producer of Gold, uses them as a symbol of freedom — free speech, free expression, the liberty of the individual. Of the two, Jancso has profited from his extra few hundred years of civilisation. He knows that the average man sitting in the cinema doesn't want to let those pretty girls on the screen go free. He would much prefer to oppress them. No doubt O'Rahilly has reasons for getting this wrong. Gold exposes more flesh than frauds, and no doubt reaps profits at the box office.
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