REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Duncan Fallowell on thoroughly modern Polanski
Chinatown Director: Roman Polanski. Stars: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Houston. 'X' Empire, Leicester Square (131 minutes) Caravan to Vaccares Director: Geoffrey Reeve. Stars: Charlotte Rampling, David Birney, Michel Lonsdale. 'AA' Odeon, Leicester Square (98 minutes) Excitement fills cinemas. Shock and excess are significant elements in creating this which is why nakedness grows more elaborate, violence more ingeniously credible, bad habits more extravagant on our screens. If all you want is a cosseting poultice, if you tend to complain that they do not make them like they used to, then a glance at Anna Neagle in The Courtneys of Curzon Street on television last week should persuade even the most incorrigible nostalgia-mongerers out there that we must have gained more than we have lost. Excess on the one hand, retrospection on the other, these seem to be the options currently available to film makers. Should you, however, consider the cinema of excess to be one of the embarrassments of the age, let me point out that Gatsbyism is capable of leading you even further astray, into the boue of maudlin inertia compounded of things which never really happened. I once went through a phase of fainting on silk cushions in gothic college rooms, Imperial Russia held aloft to emphasise a point as Noel's vibrato negotiated a particularly thorny modulation, a volume of Edmund John at one's knees, thurible hissing, brocades mercurial with moths, chartreuse slipping down with improper ease. And this was only breakfast. Then along came Timothy Leary and the emotions entered a lurid floodlight. The age of innocence was over.
To those of you just climbing on to the nostalgia wave — and it could be as much James Dean as Scott Fitzgerald — let me speak from experience. Stop this nonsense at once. We can no longer plead the daydreams of youth. Fellow Britons, set aside your sepia stills, stop gagging on revivalism, it is time to do something, time to move. If however you are finding difficulty in extricating yourself from the maze of memory lane, go to see Polanski's Chinatown. Go to see it anyway. It combines both options, shock and period, and the outcome is a very advanced entertainment in which neither of these facets is gratuitous.
First the period. Faye Dunaway, right down to her tea cups, cannot put a stacked heel wrong. See her click shut a handbag or toss a perm, not to mention the slice of lemon heaven parked in her garage. SchOoled in Bonnie and Clyde, she has the pencil-skirt saunter all sewn up. This perfection of nuance is not adoptive but born out of a more comprehensive ability as an actress to get inside an attitude whence these things flow. Similarly the director. Polanski has not filled the screen with superb examples of the enamelled Art Deco cocktail trolley, the cars are mostly cars rather than museums on wheels, we are not force-fed with a selfconscious simulacrum of the past by parody of its most obvious stylistic mannerisms. The period is an assumption and consequently completely credible, a natural working mood from which to begin.
This is only one example of Polanski's celluloid intelligence and it is a rare treat. In fact this is not a nostalgia film at all. It is set in Los Angeles in 1937 because that is "when it happened." Which is not to say that the details are not Spot-on. An acquaintance of mine likes to make remarks such as, This is a dreadful film. What is that beast doing in front of the fire? The dalmation wasn't introduced until three years after this." He would be hard put to fault this one.
Then the shock. If I tell you that the story centres on the intrigues of the Los Angeles Water Board before the war you might not think it the last word in cardiac arrest. And yet, even to those of you of strong heart, I say hold on to your ventricles. This is a thriller with a capital K. We knew he was good at it, now Polanski stands supreme in the pharmacology of the cinema. By tapping your brain from the start and with a genius for the technical strings and pulleys of suspense which is quite awe-inspring, the body becomes the arena for many curious sensations. A creep of goose pimples up one arm and down the other, a vibration of the musculature which can be ameliorated through manic chain-smoking, cold sweat in the creases of the flesh followed by sudden release of tension as if someone had cut the cord of a lift in which you were ascending, vertiginous dizziness, detonations of amyl nitrate throughout. We are putty in his hands on a journey through paranoia and macabre revelation.
Nothing can be gained by an examination of the picture's internal plot events which are only comprehensible in the complex of story and effect. I might also inadvertently spill the beans and so deprive you of an unrecoverable frisson, although the film could probably retain its power to disturb over many viewings.
A few credits perhaps. To Faye Dunaway, for being a very worried woman under superb cool. To Jack Nicholson, who might even succeed in making the goody the new trend. To John Huston, who, after suggesting it all along, turns into the most repulsive monster in the last few frames. To Robert Towne, for a brilliant script which time and again, just when you think you've got it taped, proves you wildly wrong. To Roman Polanski, for casting himself as 'Man with Knife' in the most wince-making moment ever filmed, and of course for making 10.30 on Monday morning more exciting than one could ever have imagined.
Caravan to Vaccares, it is a bit like Archie Andrews trying to follow the Rolling Stones, Alastair Maclean's action pulp transposed to the Camargue. Michel Lonsdale is elegantly limp-tongued as the Duc de Croytor but Charlette RamPling and David Birney, es corting us through the travel brochures, have a more troubled time trying to make phlegmatics synonymous with histrionics. Geoffrey Reeve, I am led to believe, used to direct television commer cials and this British-French production is something of an experi ment in its attempt to finance Bri tish cinema from agencies beyond Wardour Street. But the grip is not quite there. Point of interest: Graham Hill makes a guest appearance as a helicopter pilot.
Previous page
