Cinema
Obsessive
Clancy Sigal
The Man Who Loved Women (Gala Royal) Assault on Precinct 13 (Screen on the Green, Islington) Francois Truffaut's latest film, The Man Who Loved Women (X), opens with a great Male fantasy. Charles -Denner, playing a Mildly depressed bachelor and congenital Skirt 'chaser, has been struck by a car and killed while following yet another pair of beautiful legs in Montpelier, where he Works as a wind-tunnel expert. A whole flock of his fcirmer mistresses — young, old,
fat, thin, but all who at some time or another had something for Denner — turns up at his funeral. With genuine sorrow (and mirthful malice in one or two cases) they mourn the passing of a man who may not have been either handsome or even very interesting but, literally, couldn't help loving them. His pretty, blonde editor — towards the end of his life Denner wrote a book about his obsession —stands off to one side, narrating. At the conclusion of her story we may not know all that much more about the sources of Denner's neurosis — if it was one — but I think many men especially will identify with his energetic hunt for some kind of essence of love. I did..
After the clumsy horrors of Looking for Mr Goodbar, which I wrote about last week, perhaps there is a danger of my over-estimating Truffaut's gentle, easygoing film. But it strikes true, if not deeply, as a study of a man for whom the company of women is almost like an addiction. He is not, in ordinary terms, a satyr. Rather, a mournful wolf. Women fall for him because he is so direct about his need. Or maybe it's how he looks. Denner is no beauty: bignosed, sallow and edging towards middle age. As he follows a lovely, anonymous pair of legs down the street or turns his head to flirt with a slightly hysterical wife dining in a gloomy café with her complacent husband, Denner wears an expression less like the hunter than the quarry. He's a nut — but knows it, and that is something, Truffaut insists, which many women find irresistible.
Denner is by no means always successful. One ageing pat ronne of a dress shop rejects him because she goes only for young men. And at least one of his mistresses leaves him because, as she puts it, he refuses to love or be loved. (Like Diane Keaton in Mr Goodbar, he dislikes waking up with them in the morning.) Typically Gallic, Denner is . turned on most of all by the idea of love. He never really grew up, according to Truffaut's analysis. A few, mercifully brief flashbacks to his boyhood 'explain' his compulsion as the result of his cold-hearted but sexually attractive mother using him as a go-between to her many lovers. As psychology it's pretty thin, but it makes for a nice, unviolent, sadly charming movie.
A couple of weeks ago I recommended John Carpenter's sci-fi film, Dark Star, as a funnier, less flabby Star Wars. Mr Carpenter scores again as the writer-director of an equally low-budget, tough and compelling thriller, Assault on Precinct 13 (X).
Los Angeles, today. In a burned-out section of the ghetto the police are shutting down one of their precinct houses while moving to larger quarters. A marauding band of mainly black and chicano gang boys, armed with silencer-equipped, .modern weapons, kills a little girl and an ice cream vendor at random. The girl's father shoots one of the gang, then, shocked into speechlessness, runs for refuge to the virtually derelict precinct house. The exposed station, besieged by the gang, is held by a black police officer, a woman secretary and a prisoner on his way to Death Row.
The story couldn't be cruder or more corny. But Mr Carpenter's script has the ability, almost lost in today's big-budget, boring blockbusters, vividly to sketch in character with just one or two lines of dialogue. No scene lasts longer than it should. And the acting, by Austin Stoker as the police officer, Darwin Joston as the prisoner and Laurie Zimmer as the secretaryheroine, is precise and efficient. Judging from his first two films, John Carpenter may be around for a long time. God grant he not be given larger budgets.
Previous page
