London Film Festival
Putting on the Style
By JAMES BREEN Jacques Demy's Lola, with which the festival opened, was certainly not brittle in mood; on the contrary it was soft to the point of cuddliness. The story of a cabaret singer who has patiently waited seven years for her lover to come back to her, it defies the contemporary modish pre- ference for cynical bleakness and characters who cannot connect, by being consistently tender and ending happily. As in a fairy-story, where the young knight goes off (for seven years—the magic number) to seek his fortune, the lover re- turns in a suit of white linen and a shining car to reclaim his girl and—a modern touch—his small son, and everyone sheds tears of rapture and relief.
But this is not, of course, all. It would be very surprising if it were. Lola is M. Demy's first feature and he has to show off his paces. So he gives us an experiment in time. While the girl waits—and Anouk Aimde, with deliciously scatty sweetness, really persuades us that she has no choice but to wait—she takes up with two other men, a gift-bearing American sailor called Frankie and a moody, bookish young man whom she had known in her childhood. One is to assume, apparently, that the affair with the sailor, the meeting with the young man and the return of the lover all occurred at different periods of time, but M. Derry squashes them up together—and the result is a jumble of wildly improbable coincidences. Such spatial experi- ments are acceptable when—as in Hiroshima Mon Amour—the narrative pattern of the film arises out of personal recollection and interior monologue. But with Lola, which is constructed from external events and conventional 'plot' de- vices, the experiment becomes a tiresome, irre- levant device, applied from the outside to show that the director is up to the minute. The fashionable use of a Beethoven symphony and clattering harpsichords on the music track and a preposterous sequence in which Frankie takes a pubescent girl to the fair and the pair of them bounce gravely into slow motion to indicate 'an experience' are equally unsatisfactory.
Lola undoubtedly has moments of charm; but it is an empty vessel. One is driven to conclude that, like some other new French directors, M. Derry is bedevilled by 'style' simply because he has nothing to tell us. It is always the idea that imposes its own style; arid intellectual contriv- ances and abstract formal preoccupations occur when the idea fails. And films (or books or music), however beautifully or brilliantly com- posed, that are about nothing, are in the end meaningless and boring.
The lack of nourishment that one finds in the work of some modern Parisian directors is strikingly shown up by 11 Posto, an Italian film scripted and directed by Ermanno Olmi and by a long way the best thing I have seen so far at the festival. The bones of the story are spare: nothing more, in fact, than a teenage boy going to Milan to get his first job. He travels to the city, takes a series of absurd exams and IQ tests, has a few shy encounters with a girl of his own age, and eventually gets the job. But inside this lean frame the director composes a whole world of fresh and curious observation. The attitude is warm and positive—though never nudging us this way or that. Olmi, who comes from documentary films, records, without commenting, the way people stare into shop-windows or be- come absorbed in a half-heard snatch of con- versation while waiting for a train, the way a middle-aged woman looks when she realises that a young man is trying to pick her up at a party or the compulsion one has to look at the under- side of one's cup in a coffee-bar. What is more, these social comments are made with an indivi- dual, not a conventional and generalised, eye, and an eye that loves to observe the oddities of passers-by; Olmi does not sneer at these oddities, he shows us that they exist and that he likes them. As a result, we like them too. The narrative bounds forward with superb ease and technical assurance, concentrating entirely on what is im- portant and dispensing altogether with needless linking passages, and the direction of the big- eyed, raw-voiced Alessandro Panzeri in the part of the boy, coupled with this young actor's ob- viously exceptional talent, produces the ab- solutely authentic rhythm of an adolescent's wondering, experimental existence.
Another interesting Italian piece is Elio Petri's L'Assassino, in which the ubiquitous Marcello Mastroianni plays the part of a man arrested one morning, under suspicion of a murder he hasn't in fact committed, and painstakingly questioned until the real culprit is tracked down. The direc- tion wryly blends farce and sinister menace— there is a wonderfully two-edged moment when, in the middle of his investigation, the Inspector drifts off to the beach to skim pebbles over the sea—and the abrupt, instantaneous transitions from present to past and back again are effort- lessly managed. The interrogation itself re- sembles psychoanalysis rather than police ques- tioning; and, as the film proceeds, the moral position of the suspect absorbs us more than the factual details of the crime.
Jean-Pierre Melville's contribution is Leon Morin, Pretre, which he has adapted himself from the book by Beatrix Beck. Set in a French provincial town during the occupation, this is the story of a young widow of socialist convic- tions whose keenly questing mind plays with the fire of Christian teaching, at first scornfully, then with gradually mounting fascination. She has long discussions with a young priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and, after a moment of inexplicable private revelation, she is converted. Emmanuele Riva's intense, clever, probing performance gives us every layer in the complex character of the woman, and Melville's austerely enclosed domes- tic interiors—the scenes in the confessional are, both visually and dramatically, the key to the film—are masterly.
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