Cinema

Anti-heroines

Clancy Sigal

Julia (Odeon Haymarket) It would be easy to dismiss Julia (A) as a slick romantic fantasy, or even as a sac charine exploitation of a much-belaboured anti-Nazi theme which Hollywood producers make when they want to appear dar ing and ultra-serious. The casting of Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave as the two friends drawn into the German Resistance seems cheaply obvious: both are known political activists. And the film itself, directed by that master of underpacing Fred Zinnermann, is hardly audacious in its glossy craftmanship. Julia gets off to a slow, erratic start; structurally, it is all over the place; and a number of vital points concerning the two women are blunted or ignored. Yet it is a compelling, intelligent and not-to-be-missed film.

What makes Julia so refreshing, aside from Jane Fonda's gritty, generous performance as the playwright Lillian Hellman, is that it presents two kinds of relationships seldom seen on the screen. Fonda's affair with the detective novelist Dashiell Hammett, played with wonderful humour by Jason Robards, depends on a reverse of the usual male-female thing. Hammett, a shrewd old pro, is simply there to give encouragement and advice to Hellman and to act as a sounding board for her temporarily blocked literary impulse. When she whines she can't get started as a writer, he is sympathetic but tough with her. 'If you're going to cry about it, Lily, go and stand on a rock,' he says with tender disgust. Almost the best scenes in the picture occur between Fonda and Robards, but these are subordinate to the major link between Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave as the elusive, rich and radical Julia.

Alvin Sargent has written a good, playable screenplay from a Hellman short story included in her book of reminiscence Pentimento. But he cannot go much beyond what Hellman wrote, which is a pity,

because the close emotional relationship between the two women often verges on the gushy. It's a tribute to Zinnermann's professionalism, and possibly to the basic drive of the Hellman story, that we are forced to take seriously something which in clumsier hands would not be very credible.

Julia, though she probably existed, really is a concoction of Hellman's backwardlooking imagination perhaps even a projection of her fantasised better self: noble, self-sacrificing, all-knowing, tender and infinitely superior in her steadfast willingness to locate the evil of our time and hurl herself courageously at it. On the printed page I only half-believed in Julia; one's imagination discounted some of the purplish prose Hellman used to describe her without disallowing the fact that people like Julia not only existed in the Thirties but probably were really that capable of inspiring the more timid to emulate their heroism. On screen Vanessa Redgrave greedily eats up the role without anything like Fonda's feeling for variety and contradiction. Just as Fonda seems to grow before our very eyes as an actress, Redgrave's talent becomes increasingly selfparody of her truelife political stance. She clearly takes an unhealthy delight in mimicking Julia's martyrdom as a onelegged victim of Nazi brutality who has renounced all, including her baby, for the Cause. Those blazing eyes, that thin fanatic mouth, the semi-mad urgency of the incredibly self-righteous egotism: either Redgrave is, as usual, indulging herself or Zinnermann is making a subtler film than I think he is. What a very interesting picture Julia would be if it had even slightly

suggested that Hellman's idol was also cap able of being a deeply flawed, even grotes quely manipulative woman who glorifed in self-drama. Or that the complex currents running between these two women may have also involved a battle for superiority (Hellman is always the 'pupil' of Julia's gre ater awareness), envy, malice, even physical desire.

But in that sense Julia is safely conventional. The script, director and actresses insist on taking Julia at face value as an anti-fascist saint, while Hellman looks back on herself as well with almost total approval. (If they'd ever met, Hammett-an equally courageous but less selfdramatising anti-fascist would have loathed Julia.) When a drunk suggests to young Lillian that she and Julia are having a lesbian affair, Fonda socks him in the jaw. And we are expected to applaud her reaction to this insult. Lillian Hellman has always had this lamentable tendency to refuse to stand up fully for her artistic as opposed to political convictions. Again, Julia would have been a braver film if in this scene Fonda had simply laughed and said something like: 'What a bore you are!' Or 'So what?'

But, within its limitations as a highly romanticized, rather dreamy vision of one woman by another, Julia generates unusual

excitement. The flashbacks to Julia and Lillian as girlhood chums may be hazily weak. But when the film reaches the heart of Hellman's story Julia's recruitment of Hellman to smuggle money into Germany for the anti-Nazi movement it's terrific.

The long sequence of Lillian's train ride into Germany while carrying the money stitched into an absurd Russian fur hat had me gripping the arms of my seat. By now Fonda has convinced us that Hellman, revelling in the success of her first Broad

way hit, The Children's Hour, is someone who will think several times before risking

her neck. Through an intermediary in Paris, Julia has sent her a simple message: 'Please, if you cannot do it, do not do it.' Hellman, wrapped in newly-bought furs and enjoying a triumphal European tour with Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell, is by no means sure of what to do. When she finally decides to smuggle the money across the frontier, the audience has had a chance to struggle inside her head and heart with her. It becomes believable that, out of a mish-mash of motives, Lillian commits herself, even though she knows that Julia probably might not approve of the way she arrived at her decision.

The great thing about Fonda's performance aboard the train is the antiheroism of it: she is literally sick with fear. I imagine that if ever I had the guts to do

• something like this I'd probably react the same way halfcursing myself, in a state of paranoid panic toward the other passengers, clumsy and nearly fainting with tension. (There's a nice Zinnermann touch here: two passengers in the same compartment keep glaring narrowly at Fonda as the train approaches the frontier. When she freudianly forgets the fur hat on her seat for a moment, one of them leans foward and sternly, wordlessly returns it to her: they're Julia's pals, along to keep an eye on the money).

How many times have we watched the hero stand in a queue while the Nazi border officials suspiciously examine each passenger's papers? Yet Zinnermann and Fonda make it seem fresh and terrifying all over again. I practically collapsed with relief when, with a final doubting squint at her passport, the German officer let Fonda through.

Julia can be faulted for its refusal to take more risks. After all, didn't teenage Julia advise the youthful Hellman to 'Work hard take chances be very bold', and wasn't that one of the reasons why Hellman fell in love with her? The film, like Hellman's writing, is too self-congratulatory and selfregarding. A little more emphasis on Hellman's bitchy, commercial side would have

helped. And, as is usual with films of this period, the Nazis are stock brutes with no real substance to them. Anti-nazism in the Thirties had become a comfortable, oddly comforting mythology for those who exhausted themselves in that struggle and no longer can bear to see that the beast is still, very much, with us.