CANNES FILM FESTIVAL r
Funeral Baked Meats
THIS year marks the twentieth annivevary of the first Cannes Film Festival. On the other hand, the current festival is billed as the nine- teenth, while the Festival Bulletin proudly announces that it is in its twenty-first year of publication. In the confusion, there have been few signs of celebration. The most important• is an exhibition mounted by the Cinematheque Frangaise from its collection of relics of-i the cinema and its precursors, covering a periocrbf over ninety years. Aptly entitled 'Seventy Years of World Cinema,' it includes Vivien Leigh's green and white dress from Gone With The Wind and one of Cherkassov's costumes from Ivan the Terrible as well as an unlabelled item that looks remarkably like the head of Anthony Perkins's dear old mother in Psycho. .r" Elsewhere the present festival looks less h a celebration than a wake, with great gaps in the programme—two whole days filled by Doctor Zhivago, which is not even in competition. The biggest disappointment was Chimes at Midnight or Falstaff by Orson Welles out of Shakespeare with narration from Holinshed; while not an aesthetic failure on the level of The Trial, it was far from the standard of his earlier films. In destroying the dramatic structure of the Shake- spearean originals, Welles has not managed to replace it with a strong filmic structure as he did in his remarkable Othello. Individual scenes may be ingenious and occasionally brilliant in' their staging, but the central relationship between Falstaff (played self-indulgently by Welles. him- self) and Prince Hal is at once too schematic in its bold outlines and lacking in the subtlety of detail that would make it more real. In the motley international casting of this Swiss-Spanish co-production, Welles has found himself with players who seem unable to comprehend the meaning of the words which they have to speak: the performances, particularly of Norman Rod- way as Hotspur and Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet, are often quite inadequate. The day is partially saved by the characteristic utterances of John Gielgud as Henry IV and a single well- moddlated performance by Keith Baxter as Hal.
Only two other films in the competition have been lit by any spark of original vision. Jacques Rivette has made a fine adaptation of Diderot's La Religieuse, with Anna Karina as the girl who enters a convent against her will and finds herself totally unable to accept the life of a nun. Coming from the ex-editor of Cahiers du Cinema, the magazine which also produced Godard and -Truffaut, the film is surprisingly classical in style, with carefully planned compositions and camera movements imposing an order and discipline to parallel that against which the heroine is rebelling. Strangely enough, it will probably benefit in the end from being banned by the French govern- , ment (who object to the film's depiction of the girl's attempt to escape from the clutches of the church, and its portrayal of a lesbian Mother Superior); without the scandal it might, like many other fine but unspectacular movies, have passed unnoticed by the public.
After his version of the Gospel according to St Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini has returned to the outskirts of Rome, his usual location, to make Uccellacci e uccellini, a mediaeval fable told by a crow to a modern rent-collector and his teenage son. The main actors in both halves of the film are the same, but in the fable, both men are disciples of Saint Francis of Assisi who are given the job of sanctifying the birds. They teach first the big birds, then the little birds to love each other, but are defeated by the sight of a big bird eating a little bird. The rent-collectors, who are caught between the greed of the landowners and the poverty of the peasants, grow tired of the crow's moralising and decide to eat it. Neatly worked out and often very amusing, the film owes much to its leading actor, Toth, the most popular Italian comedian, whose burlesque gesturing is exactly suited to the low comedy style of the film.
The only other film that deserves mention is Mademoiselle, the most spectacular disaster of the festival. This is the film in which Tony Richardson's commercial acumen as a packager has finally failed to obscure his incompetence as a director. The current package includes a Genet
scriprand Jeanne Moreau in the lead but neither can prevent the result from being risible in its grolesque over-emphases and its misjudgment of audrce reaction. Genet's story of a village schcrillretistress , whose sexual frustration leads her to arson and other felonies is clumsily con- structed around a long and largely redundant flashback. Even the critics who failed to notice what a mess Richardson made of John Osborne's fine Tom Jones adaptation will be unable to miss the ineptness of his latest effort. Perhaps Richard- son himself is a little ashamed of Mademoiselle, for after its first showing he removed two shots of the moon going behind clouds during the all- night sex marathon that is the film's climax. The image is such an old friend that it was greeted on both appearances by whoops of delight from the audience. If the film had been made by someone without the box-office receipts of a Totnislones behind him, it would have finished his career as a director.
The lack of good movies in the festival is evittflitly not a reflection of the state of world cinema, for outside the festival in fringe and COITI rcial showings were to be seen fine films
by ard, Bresson and Resnais. These three, eac f which- is at least as good as anything
in the festival, have a common origin in a highly enlightened Franco-Swedish co-production deal, the 4rst of its sort to provide the cinema with mo than a purely commercial boost: it has ma possible the Resnais and Bresson films win otherwise would have been unlikely to find backers. The event is one that deserved celebration in the festival—a much more worthy cause than the provision of extra publicity for Dortor Zhivago.
IAN CAMERON
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