The films of Nicolas Roeg

Charles Champlin

Los Angeles The untidy ranks of filmmakers include those who have been critics (Truffaut, Godard, Bogdanovich); editors ( Lean, Wise, Kramer, Ashby); performers (Nichols, May, Cassavetes). Not many cinematographers (Cardiff, Wexler, Fraker, Roeg) and until Nicolas Roeg, none approaching cult figure status.

Even in a version substantially cut by the American distributor, Roeg's fourth and latest feature, The Man Who Fell to Earth, has become a long-playing hit. On the strength of its success, his first solo feature, Walkabout, which was largely ignored when it was first shown here five years ago, has been brought back and is doing brisk business. It has in fact been possible to see all of Roeg's small but strongly original body of work as a director here this summer.

He was one of three second unit directors for David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia and subsequently acquired an international reputation for his stunning camera work for Francois Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, Richard Lester on Pendia and for John Schlesinger on Far From the Madding Crowd. As a director he remains an extraordinary creator of images, an impressionist filmmaker whose work can generate hypnotic powers. Like Ken Russell, he has occasionally seemed entranced by his own visual energy. Unlike Russell, whose tableaux have been growing wearyingly bizarre and indulgent for a very long time, Roeg appears to be moving towards a more disciplined matching of form and content, without sacrificing anything of the provocative and personal signature which is earning him an auteur's following.

Performance (1970), on which he was both cinematographer and co-director, with Donald Cammell, has become a cult classic for its stoned-out images and Mick Jagger's star turn as a crushed rock superstar who can't cut it any more and is living in a kinky nrinage a trois in a Notting Hill mansion invaded by James Fox as a sadistic mobster on the lam.

The telling was more interesting than the told, and there were insights that came clearer in the synopsis than on the screen. You took it on faith that a beating Fox got from his pals was 'a sado-masochistic expiation of the inadmissible sexuality of their past relationship; an example of the perversion of eroticism into ritual violence.' Right.

It was easier to see in the film that the Jagger figure understood 'the magnetism of the violence that . . . was the core or the cutting edge of his own power as a performer' and that 'the atavistic rituals of the performance with which he captured and manipulated his gigantic audience were capable of generating demonic forces beyond his control.' All that was why he had fallen silent, but it was possible, after a psychedelic, atavistic, ritualistic expiation and human sacrifice, that he would sing again.

Performance promised more than it explored, and for all its verbal solemnities it played as a trippy and sensational tour of the drugged pleasures of the 1970 pop world. It plays now as a fascinating archaeological fragment, a cave painting that moves, of that fast-receding time; and the best of it is Roeg's imagery, flashy and fumy, with blurry and languorous writhings and a nightmare concert with mushroomflavoured hallucinations.

Like the films to follow, Performance majored in states of feeling, impressions; in sensations of an other-consciousness in which the boundaries between the real and the unreal dissolve and the filmmaker offers no maps.

Walkabout, on which Roeg was both cinematographer and sole director, is at its best a recording of the Australian outback which still seems literally fabulous, including as it does shimmering, earth-engulfing suns, mirages and surreal silhouettes of snakes draped on the leafless limbs of a thorn tree such as might indeed have illustrated some bestiary fable.

The story is a fable of natural life versus civilised life to the discredit of the latter. A brother and sister are stranded in the outback after their despondent father shoots them and immolates himself, having failed to kill them as well. They survive because a young aborigine, with whom they can have no verbal communication, leads them back to a civilisation whose victim he then becomes.

The difficulty primarily is that the harshly beautiful reality of the landscapes, cruel and overwhelming, never quite meshes with the make-believe of the children who somehow look, from start to end, as if they had simply taken the long way round after Sunday school but will be home for dinner. The gulf between the seen reality and the invented reality is so great that it reduces to fatuity the philosophical argument in favour of natural versus citified man, as persuasive as it might be in another context. Still, it was early days for Roeg, but what was beyond doubt was his ability to convey moods and atmospheres, and to draw down oppressive clouds of apprehension.

In Don't Look Now (1973) Roeg was at the top of his form, and also surrendering content to form in ways that did not serve his own interests best. The film was based on a story of Daphne du Maurier, a spookY study in premonitions, perfectly placed amidst Roeg's dark, dank, dirty decaying Venice with Donald Sutherland as an archaeologist overseeing the restoration of an ancient church. Wife Julie Christie is along, to be distracted by old beauty from the new grief of the drowning of their daughter in mysterious circumstances at home in England. She wore a red slicker; why had Sutherland at just the moment of her dying scream spilt water on a transparency of a church, in whose shadows could be glimpsed a flash of red ?

Roeg finds mystification in every crumbling crevice and shadowy passage, in the maze of side canals and small arched bridges. When the menace of the moment palls, he provides scary anticipations

Sutherland's vision of Julie in widow's black at the prow of a funerary barge carrying the remains of Sutherland himself.

More paranormal things than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, and finally, I think, too many of them, despite time out for one of the steamiest erotic interludes yet included in what is not by design an erotic film—a swirling, tumbling, celebrating union of man t nd wife (intercut with flashes forward to the dull dressing-UP before going on to dinner).

Don't Look Now is a film of effect-making, the kind of thing to which some sensibilities surrender gladly and others don't. Its success was the start of the wider Roeg following, although for the stone-hearted among us there was a feeling of too much trickery visited upon too little and a lack of the discipline that defines art. Yet once again Roeg proved he has few equals at evoking the brooding and unnerving intimations of evil from the dead sticks and stones of environment.

The Man Who Fell to Earth may prove to be the largest commercial success of his films so far, with rock star David Bowie lending the box office assist that Jagger gave Performance. It is Roeg's most ambitious undertaking and the one which, for all its cryptic confusions, is the most moving and the one which holds consistently to its intentions. Bowie, pale and spectre-thin and, as we discover, masked to conceal his true other planetary features, rockets to earth on .a mercy mission for his own planet, which is dying of drought. Roeg sets up the premise ringingly well

the grainy heavens, the fireball through Space, splash-down in a mountain lake. What is set up as well is the fact that although Bowie has superpowers, he is not a superman. It takes a little getting used to, because the convention of the outer space superior race is about as old as writing.

Bowie is whiz enough to make himself a billionaire, but he is both homesick and emotionally vulnerable and technologically fallible. His information does not include how to get back upstairs nor what to take with him that is cool and wet. His story is at last a tragedy and its model is not out of Jules Verne or Ray Bradbury but Evelyn Waugh in A Handful of Dust and only the nature of the captivity is changed.

As before, Roeg in The Man Who Fell to Earth creates a kind of split-level reality, in this case Bowie's and everybody else's. And the best of the film is the sense Roeg gives of a man who is different, who (oddly I ik blind woman with the gift of foreknowlede in Don't Look Now) can only feel pain tr seeing so much in the past, the present, the future and the distance (all the way home).

Bowie is bizarre but not camp in his faked earthmanliness, vulnerable and sympathetic in his monosyllabic loneliness.

About twenty minutes have been cut from Roeg's version of the film. The missing footage, which includes an erotic scene between Bowie and Candy Clark said to be even warmer than the sequence in Don't Look Now, might or well not resolve some of the expositional mysteries. (Who was an unwatched watcher, and does it matter ? Who exactly were the adversaries and what in the name of Kafka was gbing on ?) Roeg is demonstrably no great fan of a flat-footed literalism, and this excursion into the realm of true fantasy (his first, despite fantastic elements in other films) owes no obligations to the literal—it is just that you feel yet again that Roeg has almost made a spectacularly fine and classic movie: not quite, damn near, the closest so far, a little slippage two-thirds along, the form consistently Inspired, the content gone a bit muddled, so that there is attenuation before the echoing end.

But there remains more to be impressed by, in a film that is affecting as well as spectacular. Among several haunting moments there is a sequence in which Bowie, tooling through the Southwest in a limousine, sees Iii a now-deserted grove the log cabin that once stood in it and the long-departed Pioneers who once tried to wrest a living on the frontier. They, in sepia as from an old, Old picture, stare disbelieving at the speeding intruder into their time, we and Bowie stare, astonishingly touched, into theirs.

Quite magical, it is; but an almost offhand gesture by the ceaselessly ingenious Roeg, who does appear to be gaining assurance and strength as he goes along and Whose work carries not only its own charms but the promise of much more to come.

Charles Champlin is film critic of the Los Angeles Times.