Double flip
Dump' FaHowell Crystal Voyager Director: George Greenough. 1r Odeon St Martin's Lane (78 minutes) Fantastic Planet Director: Rene • Laloux. 'V Odeon St Martin's Lane (72 minutes) The Mother And The Whore Director: Jean Eustache. Stars: JeanPierre Leaud, Bernadette Lafont, Francoise Lebrun 'X' Continental (219 minutes) The Verdict Director: Andre Cayatte. Stars: Sophia Loren, Jean Gabin. 'X' Warner West End 1 (97 minutes).
Calling surfers, drug fiends, animal lovers, front stall freaks with their blistered eyeballs, trippers allsorts, to the most unusually entertaining double bill in an age. Crystal Voyager first, continuing the saga of the water film in a purely elemental style, a movie about surfing. Not the kind which would have Hank Hunk and Beth Blossom beach-partying all night to Brenda Lee records but the utter thing which straps you to the back of .a board then lets you loose in terrific seas where the rollers curl so high that even Big Ben would have to hold its nose. A documentary in fact, photographed and narrated by George Greenough in an American monotone from which all verbal emotion has been driven in celebration of an ecstasy that Stator November 9, 1974 aPParently transcends the sensual
to attain moments of precarious bliss.
The photography is a mindbender not simply because it clearly takes you to where the action is (I for one have never been swallowed alive before by a tube of water, not even in my wildest Freudian dreams) but because of the daredevil, creative way it reveals how Neptune's personality has won so many worshippers. For surfing is more than a sport, more than a mania, it is for some the road to God and like all proper religions it is a way of life. The last section is a trip of a 'more obvious sort and is soundtracked by Pink Floyd's Echoes. Such sequences usually add up to no more than dainty good intentions but this one truly makes It to stand beside similar episodes in &is), Rider and 2001 The film's bedfellow, Fantastic Planet, is no kid brother either, a very weird science fiction cartoon set on some planet called Egam and filled with baroque inventions from the pen of Roland Topor. After the wanton brutality of the last Fritz Picture, this film's intelligence makes it seem ' downright odd, Particularly since it nurturesa moral. in the best fairytale tradition. Family cinema' carries understandable connotations of Disney at his most fatuously saccharine, but When it means a programme like this, a two-pronged pitchfork into the natural world and the imaginative world then, yes, I agree with those who say there should be more of it about. Not surprisingly after such panache, the rest of the week's films srnell rather ham and hack. Perhaps tins is unfair because at a different time The Mother and the Whore, over three and a half hours of au naturel talk about purposeful relationships within a Parisian triangle Of two girls and a boy, might well come across as cleverly, even amazingly, sustained — given its lack of action and a length so inconsiderate it is normally reserved for films about the RusSian aristocracy. Rut impatience with Sophia Loren's latest, The Verdict, is not, I am ,aure, aesthetic distortion. This 'InPlausible tale about a Mafia Widow coping with the problems of a son charged with rape and Murder must be the absolute pits in a career which has ranged from low comedy to high horror. Clothes by bior.
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