Cinema I

Marking time

Ian Christie

There are two main ways of coping with Cannes. One is to attend the Palais des Festivals twice daily for the main competition films, with occasional forays into the Quinzaine des Realisateurs and the Semaine de la Critique in search of new talent. The other tack, long favoured by younger critics and the more alert distributors, is to shun the main festival in favour of the film marche, where exploitation and avant-garde cheerfully co-exist and, in a delirious sense, all films are equal. Those whose stamina or livelihood encourages them to attempt both can sample almost everything that passes for cinema round the world, with a total of nearly five hundred films on show.

Under its new director, Gilles Jacob, the main festival this year began to win back some of the critical esteem which it has lacked in recent years. Some of the most impressive films in the competition were by directors making their first appearance in the official selection, and one of these was actually a first film. Peter Handke is well known in his native Germany, and increasingly throughout Europe, as a novelist, poet and playwright; and it was through his association with Wenders, who filmed his Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty and commissioned the script of Wrong Movement

(adapted from Goethe), that he became interested in cinema. Not surprising then that his first feature should be produced by Wenders and photographed by the latter's regular cameraman, Robbie Muller. But although The Left-handed Woman shares the laconic tone of Wenders, it deals with a crisis in the life of an 'ordinary' woman, who makes her voyage of self-discovery by staying put. Abruptly one morning she asks her husband to leave her and their child alone in the house, and from this point she begins to explore the idea of independence. The wife and bewildered husband are played by the principals from Rohmer's Marquise von 0, Edith Clever and Bruno Ganz, and both respond admirably to the minute demands of Handke's conception. For some, the spare, painterly images and sparse dialogue proved too slow, but I found it the most exciting discovery of the festival.

Two years ago, Oshima's Ai No Corrida was the sensation of the Quinzaine, so

understandably there was intense specu

lation about his 'sequel', now promoted to the official competition, Ai No Borei (known in France as L'Empire des Passions but, according to the Japanese, properly translated as The Phantom of Love). In

complete contrast, this turned out to be an atmospheric period piece about a village woman persuaded by her young lover to acquiesce in the murder of her husband, who then returns as a ghost to hound the guilty pair to their eventual death. It cer tainly seems to be the most traditional film Oshima has yet made, occasionally recalling Kobayashi or even Mizoguchi, untouched by the radical formal concerns of his earlier

work, and equally refusing to repeat the highly saleable eroticism of Ai No Corrida.

Possibly it was this return to Japanese tradition that prompted the jury's Best Director award.

If Oshima has taken an unexpected turn, the other debutant, Chabrol — astonishingly in competition for the first time with his

thirty-second film — is once again doing what he has always done best. Violette Noz iere is a remorseless study of the Misery and

triumph of the petit bourgeois spirit, as revealed in the real-life case of Violette,

who was condemned to death for poisoning her father in 1933, but later reprieved and lived happily ever after as a respectable wife and mother. Isabelle Huppert plays the part with steely brilliance, in total contrast to her demure Lacemaker, and deserved more than a share of the Best Actress prize. Chabrol directs with more care and precision than he has shown for years and catches every nuance of the claustrophobic family life that goads Violette into acting out her fantasies.

The fact that it was Olmi's L'Albero degli Zoccoli (The Clog Tree) which collected the Grand Prix suggests that the jury cared

more for sentiment than cinema — a view

supported by the awards to Ferreri's dotty New York fable Ciao Maschio and to Jill Clayburgh in Paul Mazursky's soap opera, An Unmarried Woman. Olmi's painstaking chronicle of peasant life on a large farm in Lombardy in the 1890s had all the marks of a conservative riposte to Bertolucci's Novecento. Against the hardship and manifest injustice of the peasants' life, Olmi solemnly offers the assurances a the church — the sick cow is actually cured by a miracle — and the consolations of nature. His ability to handle a non-professional cast and sustain a minimal narrative over nearly three hours is remarkable — and it certainly made for better viewing than Marco Leto's sub-Visconti epic, The Old and the Young —therefore all the more depressing to conclude that it merely represents a paralysing appeal to nostalgia, an extended advertisement for the simple life.

This year the Quinzaine celebrated its first decade, having started in the aftermath of the 1968 upheavals at Cannes with the aim of programming more adventurously than the official festival. Oddly enough, the most interesting work in this year's selection was mostly American, although not from Hollywood. However, Claudia Weill's independent feature Girlfriends should soon take her there, as it's already been snapped up by Warners, who obviously realised that her witty portrait of a young girl trying to stay independent in New York could catch on in a big way. Another New Yorker, Mark Rappaport, whose work has long been championed by the Edinburgh Film Festival, scored his biggest success to date with a modernist melodrama, The Scenic Route, which cleverly juxtaposes the banalities of pulp romance with the mythic romance of Gluck's Orfeo e Eurydice.

Perhaps the most unexpected 'discovery' of the Quinzaine was Bob Dylan, in his new role as writer, director, editor and (occasional) star of an epic romance, Renaldo and Clara. True the film includes a series of magnificent live performances from the

Rolling Thunder revue, with Dylan, Baez and others; but these are embedded in an ironically oblique fiction, carved from the Dylan mythology, which carries this fourhour marathon far beyond the conventional concert-and-backstage format.

Unfortunately, there were few if any discoveries to report from the marche, although among the commercial screenings it was good to see the return of Monte Hellman, with an Italian western, China 9, Liberty 37 (the title refers to a signpost between two small Texas towns), which returns

to the elliptical realism of his last western,

The Shooting. Once again, Warren Oates plays the diffident Hellman protagonist,

now joined by Jenny Agutter and the Italian star Fabio Testi. By coincidence, Hellman was cited as a strong influence on the young French actor and director Jean-Francois

Stevenin, who appeared in no less than three festival films, including his own Passe Montagne, an astonishingly fluent inventory of the pleasure of narrative cinema, seemingly abstracted from the stuff of countless action movies.

A good festival? My main impression was of innumerable feet marking time. There

were few films that broke any new ground, or even tried to do so; instead many film makers had retreated to established positions and conventional forms. One reason for these trends may be the growing importance of television finance in film production, but more generally the international cinema seems to be entering a phase of cautious retrenchment. And here, at least, Britain proudly leads the way: a vast hoarding displayed on the Croisette ifl Cannes proclaimed the second re-make of The Thirty-Nine Steps!