ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
The London Film Festival
By ISABEL QUIGLY Redbeard: Gertrud; Shakespeare Wallah; Kapu- rush and Mahapatush; Moment of Truth.
rr HE yearly London Film Festival takes the 1 cream of the other festivals and for anyone lucky enough to be within reach of the National Film Theatre in November, and, luckier still, to get seats (sell-outs are normal), it is; you might argue,' like a fast spin round Cannes, Venice, Berlin, San Sebastian and the rest of them without the sun, the starlets and the tedium of sitting through hours of the lesser stuff. Much, probably most, of what is shown turns up commercially later on: already the Swedish Dear John has done so, and on Alphaville, A Blonde in Love and Fists in the Pocket, which will be coming• up next,,we have been asked to be silent. Here are some others I am certain will be showrt more widely.
Akira KurOsawa's Redbeard: a Japanese hospital about a century ago, but the problems are so familiar one almost laughs at so many coincidences of mood. Of course, hospitals tempt one to all sorts of gnomic notions: being factories of birth and death, forcing-houses of emotion, where everything is so basic that the rest of the world seems trivial, and relation- ships are proportionately intense. Where else can you find instant fiction so plentifully, so in- tensely? Too many, of course, have thought this ,already.
Redbeard is a hospital story with no difference in kind from alt sorts of others (if you go by the plot is sounds banal, even sentimental), but with such an enormous difference in degree— such heat, such terror and beauty and cumulative nobility and in all senses awfulness—that it is rather like having Dr. Kildare in the hands of Dostoievsky. Redbeard is a saintly martinet who lives for the good of his pathetic slum patients; he knows that what half of them need is just a few weeks of good feeding and that medicine, anyway, can't do• much for the rest. But he Can help them to die, which is something. Some of his helpers can't stand it, and take the chance to leave when they can; some criticise his high- handed methods, and he himself never thinks himself anything but ignoble because, to pro- tect some of his poor, he goes in for a little mild blackmailing of magistrates and suchlike. The film is long (over three hours), exhausting and exhilarating, and throws all one's notions about the impassive East out of the window, for everyone (doctors included) cries and cries on the least provocation. And there's plenty, admittedly„ to cry about. But surely this is the most grandiose weepie, and quite taken out of the weepie class by its own grandeur.
TO write about Carl Dreyer's' Gertrild after a single viewing seems like trying to sum up Aliddlentarch after a two-hour scamper through What the main characters are up to. It has been hailed as a masterpiece, derided as senile, and the time I saw it caused open yelps of amuse- ment, especially towards the end. Dreyer is so much out of fashion, so much beyond fashion at any rate, that you have to use narrative yard- sticks, that no longer apply. Slow, unexplicit, With what you feel .is a volcanic interior under a thick crust of..stylistic ice, this diary of a soul has an originality". that no one else's' work
approaches—because Dreyer is speaking the language of the cinema with his ancient, now almost archaic, skill, but with an accent that doesn't belong to the age of the cinema at all, and is almost bound to be misunderstood.
From obvious difficulty to deceptive ease: James Ivory's Shakespeare Wallah is, to me, the most purely enchanting film to come along for years. Fact and fiction bolster each other to give an extra piquancy, since Felicity Kendall and her father play father and daughter in exactly the sort of theatrical touring company in which they have, in fact, been touring India for yearS. This is Anglo-India, almost twenty years on : a boarding-house called Gleneagles and young men with accents now found, in England, only among the elderly; and such an exaggerated irony of tone and chat and nuance that you inevitably think of Forster and find the film standing up well even in such august company (Ray, an- other obvious name it conjures at moments, wrote the music). Lizzie, the young actress, born in India around independence-time, has never been 'Home,' and the parents, ageing actors, wonder what, if anything, would be there for them if they ever went Home themselves. Their dream is to send Lizzie, anyway; but hers, for a time, is a dazzling Indian playboy who doesn't mean to get too much involved. They tOur- sometimes striking it rich with an appreciative maharajah, sometimes left high and 'dry, as when the boys' school they've played to for years just can't fit them in between cricket practices. Sadness, mostly : an old actor dies, the last English member of the cast outside the family; or a man, having got his girl, gently but obviously stops wanting her; or things just crumble—a relationship, a memory, a feeling. The girl is just right: so modern in looks, yet somehow out of period in attitude; and like the whole film, so likeable. It will soon be shown at the Academy.
No festival would be quite a festival for me without a film of Satyajit Ray's, and this one has two: Kapurush (The Coward) was shown at Venice, the second, Mahapurash (The Holy Man). has its European premiere now.
Both are disappointments. Ray's main charac- teristic is leisureliness, a refusal to be hustled or explanatory; at his best this slowness matches the tempo of the life he deals with, at his worst it makes him leaden. Kapurush is a story of disap- pointment and disillusion: a young screenplay writer meets his lost love, who, given a second chance, refuses it. But here Ray is creakily self- indulgent, calls his hero 'Ray,' has him played by the familiar Madhabi Mukherjee (and the lost love, to make it all more familiar, by Soumitra Chattcrjee), and spends the whole film making people say : 'This will do for your next film.' ',Don't forget to put us in your next film,' and so on, meantime appearing to caricature himself being `delicate,' thoughtful,"sensitive,' and all the other things he is said to be. Mahaparash is a comedy about a fake holy man who looks like Liberace in an old-fashioned bathing cap and gives the crowd his big toe to touch. It has funny moment but Ray isn't the man for jolly satire and the jokes limp along, gasping for recog- nition.-
Francesco Rosi's The•Moment of Truth is about bull-fighting, and you would need to have'seen more bull-fights than I have to make technical judgments on the quality of its (real-life) bull- lighter, Miguelin. But the way the bull-fights are presented, in terrifying, technicolor close-up, only sickens: bull after bull bleeding, first to fury, then to death under our noses, give little idea of the distanced grace at beauty the crowd may find in it : a case, I think, of the film distorting by showing too much. Or. perhaps it is just a case of an Italian director making a film about Spain, drunk with the glamour, and always just that little bit out.
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