ARTS
The revolutionary conga line
PENELOPE HOUSTON
In The Confrontation (Academy One, 'A)y Miklos Jancs6 has set dialectic to the tempo of a swaying revolutionary conga line; and the effect—ascetic, geometrical, but exuber- ant—is perhaps not unlike that when Cour- reges first set the severe Paris models pranc- ing to jig-time. The film's ultimate moral belongs sternly in Jancsci territory: a more than lucid realisation that youth outings can end in book-burnings, and that when anyone is given enough rope to hang himself (who are the givers?—those secretively final powers who plot the moves on all Jancs6's chessboards) he can be watched in the act of lacing it around his neck. But the film's mood is also sunshine and mini-skirts and a ceaseless jigging dancing by and in front of the circling camera; and that, for Janes& is new.
At the outset, a group of students are playing around by a reservoir. A police jeep rolls up, and the students block its path, squat down in front of it. But the year is 1947 in Hungary, and the mini-skirts aid sit- downs are only a brilliantly effective anachronism, an inquiring echo across a generation. Communism has taken over the students are from the leftist People's Col- leges; and these suddenly are their friendly neighbourhood police, to put up smilingly with having their pistols pinched and being tumbled cheerfully into the pond.
Everyone proceeds to the great baroque monastery, like a walled enclave on a mediaeval hill-top, where the students are to stage a debate with boys of a Catholic seminary. First the confrontation doesn't go at all; then it's spun and folk-songed and danced into some approach to contact. At which point, the friendly policeman pulls out a warrant for the arrest of half-a-dozen Catholic boys. The left student leader, a thoughtful romantic in a red shirt, blenches at a brusquer reality. A tough little girl takes over from him, a budding terrorist with a sterner dream of priests unfrocked and books piled for burning. And then authority steps in, to curb an ardour which has strayed over the edge of the party line. Power, cool and amiable in a white shirt, has among its functions that of bringing dreamers to heel.
Jancs6's film ends with a dazzling kind of mental time-slip, a return to the dancing by the reservoir which for an instant lets one think that nothing has really happened, and it's all to be done again. But the picture is a constant pattern of unspoken reversals, shifts in attitudes towards the stoical church- men, the wrily play-acting policeman, the revolutionary songs which can sound so bright and burning or so cracked and mech- anical. This is never a dark film, and instead of Jancs6's usual progression of menace here is young revolutionary power on the rampage, fizzing with untried trust in the solemn bravery of its new world. Only round the edges of the film runs the sense of what happens next time, when the police- man has some bullets in his pistol.
Perhaps only in Hungary, where the cinema seems to regard debate as a condi- tion of existence, could a convinced socialist artist conduct this sort of mobile exploration into the contours of revolutionary power. (Though a Hungarian friend throws out a Chinese-box suggestion about JancsO's logic: if the pieces on the board are never more than pieces, briefly allowed the allusion that they are controlling their own moves, then what of Jancso's own films? Are they, too, to be regarded as subject to this deceptive law?) But the form of The Confrontation gives it the impetus of a continuing argu- ment: like its camera, it never stands still.
Jean-Luc Godard made Contempt (Paris Pullman, 'X') seven years ago, which is a long time for a film to take in crossing the Channel for its first commercial screening. This time, though, it looks less like a case of better late than never than, conceivably, of better late than before. At least, one couldn't have a timelier reminder of what an engag- ing director Godard could be, before he embroiled himself in a cinema of unresolved harangue and alienating technique. Contempt looks nothing less than superb: come back, that Godard.
In terms of its organisation (made by a Hollywood-backed company, with Brigitte Bardot) and its origins in a Moravia novel, Contempt is probably about the closest Godard ever came to a 'commercial' picture, It is the story of a writer (Michel Piccoli) who becomes vaguely involved, in the way such things happen, with a film company doing The Odyssey. The producer (Jack Palance) is a great slab of rock-like American inertia, given to immense empty silences and sudden enunciations of definitive banality. The director is Fritz Lang, playing himself, a silky stoic from an older cinema, mockingly quoting to the new BB (Bardot) the verses about Hollywood by the old BB (Brecht). Bardot, intermittently got up in a black wig, plays the writer's wife. He can't understand why she suddenly despises him; provokes her with needling questions, circles after a damaging definition of the precise moment in his film company affairs when love turned to boredom. The central scene of the film is an astonishing half-hour duologue, languid and nagging, played out against the white walls and brilliant splashes of colour in the couple's flat. They proceed to Capri. At the end, with his wife and the producer both meaninglessly dead, the writer walks up the great sloping ramp of the villa to the flat roof where Fritz Lang is still directing The Odyssey, manoeuvring an actor in fancy- dress meaninglessly against a blank horizon.
The film is crammed with delectable detail: Lang's performance, Godard running scruf- fily in and out of the set as the Master's assistant, the notion about The Odyssey (was Odysseus happier away from home?) which is used as an oblique cross-reference, the highly significant role of the girl interpreter. (Georgia Moll) who translates from French to English to Italian for the multi-lingual film unit. She and Lang are the professionals in a world of incomprehension. When I first saw Contempt. I remember that one felt almost too aware of its technique and of the colours and objects of its decor: now all that has been absorbed. Godard's elliptical methods have become almost standard prac- tice, and his bare, bright interiors are all around us. Ore sees the essential film more straightly. And the overwhelming impression is of Godard's conflict with the romantic in himself, the endless questioning of th, romantic impulses he can't resist. Now, th. revolutionary prophet has tried to smothe the romantic; and perhaps it is because tha can't really be done that Godard's new film mirror such confusion. He has decided thai films shouldn't be 'aesthetic objects': bu aesthetic objects, as beautiful as Contempt are what he can't help making.
In content at least, the best scene in Tilt Only Game in Town (Carlton. 'A') oddl, echoes the central episode of Contempt Here it is a gambler needling, cajoling, lying provoking answers he doesn't want, playinr the woman's role, to find out just where hi. mistress has hidden his money. He (Warrer Beatty) is a Las Vegas drifter, playing oh tunes on a bar-room piano; she (Elizabett Taylor) is a chorus girl with a taste for oh movies. Will they finally get hitched? Well of course. George Stevens, who hasn't made a film since the melancholy The Greatest Story Ever Told, directs with an old- fashioned thoughtfulness, formality and good manners which are ponderously pleasing, in spite of the time Frank Gilroy's script takes to advance from A to B. Miss Taylor. although not exactly the likeliest chorus girl. has chances to show an essential waspish toughness, which becomes her much better than ice-cream melting.
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