ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
The Long and the Odd and the Short
By IAN CAMERON
T'S always difficult to say anything general labout the Cannes Festival. Certainty no trends were revealed this year—anyway trends detected at festivals invariably turn out to be illusory. The quality was on the whole below average and the shorts with which most programmes were garnished were uniformly ghastly. Especially intolerable were a Czech opus which accom- panied a Bach organ fantasia with animated shots of holes appearing in walls, and a Chinese puppet film about a nasty capitalist who made his cock crow long before dawn each day to get extra work from his peasants. Among the longer films were half a dozen that actually drove me from the cinema and one so deliriously bad that it kept me there. This was Les Pianos Mecaniques, by Juan' Antonio Bardem, shreds of whose reputation survive even now from the days when people admired Death of a Cyclist. Humourlessly ludicrous, it provided one un- forgettable image of comic horror: Melina Mercouri dressed in nothing but gladioli.
Although it is fun to be nasty about bad movies, I want to talk about the good things. One failure, though, is worth mentioning because it is a grave disappointment : Francesco Rosi's The Moment of Truth. Everyone had the highest expectations of the first film in colour by the brilliant director who made Salvatore Giuliano and Hands on the City. It has two subjects: its story about a young bullfighter, and its setting, Spain, The first is the old one about the poor boy who rises to fame and is killed in the' ring, but the .connections to the more general subject are never really made. In his last two films, Rosi's great achievement was the handling of very complex narratives with a clarity that revealed the. forces,' involved. Here he has tried to use a simple story as the image of a general situation, and has failed, except in a stunning first sequence which uses the pro- cessions of the Semana Santa in Seville to tie together religion, militarism, superstition and bullfighting as essential parts of his image of Spain. Rosi's other achievement is his presenta- tion of peasant society as a way of life rather than as a piece of folklore, a tour de force which he performs by using the 'scope screen as a way of avoiding the death-trap of pictorialism.
Less was to be expected of the other entries, since none of the directors had the stature of Rosi (except, of course, Otto Preminger, whose In Harm's Way opened the Festival), but a num- ber of modest pleasures were on offer. There was, for example. The Knack, which won the main prize--possibly a bad thing for its director, who has gone just about as far as he can go along his particular line of feverish ingenuity. But in spite of several infuriating stretches the film has both wit and charm, qualities rare in British films, and also one enormously accom- plished performance, from Ray Brooks. It was a good festival for Britain. Even the idiotic plagiarisms of The 1peress File thrilled the suckers. Britain won both acting awards for a mainly American movie. William Wyler's The Collector, in which Samantha Eggar (good) and Terence Stamp (less so) were made to play much too slowly; it would have worked better if it had been half an hour shorter. Much more deserving of the acting award were the three principals of Sidney Lumet's The Hill: Sean Connery, Harry Andrews and Ian Hendry. all giving the per- formances of their lives. The film. set in an army prison camp, caught the right note of sadistic persecution in the writing and acting, though it sometimes overplayed its hand in an attempt to'bludgeon the audience with camera- work.
In a festival that contained an unusual num ber of war films by far the best was the. French 317 Section. directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer, one of the very rare war films (like Raoul Walsh's version of The Naked and the Dead) which give one the impression of real war on the screen. Unlike Walsh. Schoendoerffer partici- pated in the war he depicts—the French cam- paign in Indochina—but the cinema demon- strates time and again that experience of the real thing is little help in making a movie. Schoen- doerffer's achievement is considerable, particu- larly in extracting from ex-teenager charmer Jacques Perrin a most convincing performance as the young officer in command of an isolated patrol.
Apart from Kon Ichikawa's film of the Olym- pic Games. which as the work of someone who obviously did not love sport was a series of pretties in excellent colour, only two other films in the main programme are worth mentioning. Mai Zetterling's first feature, Loving Couples, may be something of an anthology of other Swedish movies, but it is highly expert, has all the usual Swedish actors doing their numbers and a gorgeously ribald performance from the divine Eva Dahlbeck, Possibly I was the only critic who liked the Spanish film, El Juego de la Oca, a funny movie about unhappy people, full of momentary visualisations of their thoughts. memories. hopes, fears or desires.
Close to the Festival itself lies the Critics' Section, in which a job lot of Parisian critics present a selection of pictures with an alarming tendency toward pretentious drivel and an occa-. sional interesting movie like the Canadian Le Chat dans le Sac. This is a subjective piece about the personal and social problems of a young Separatist, which seemed no less fascinat- ing than it had in the passionately intellectual milieu of the Montreal Festival last summer. This year, too, the Critics' Section presented the best single movie in the Festival, which sur- prisingly was Polish, Jerzy Skolimowski's Walk- over. It is a justification of the special circum- stances which surround film-making in Poland. for nowhere else would a young and unknown director get the chance to write, direct and play the leading part in a film of such uncom- promising complexity. In a breathless eighty-five minutes containing only about fifteen shots, we had a non-realistic social film, a memory film without flashbacks. Through the bemusing and often hilarious adventures of an unsatisfactory member of socialist society, Skolimowski tells a story that is (to use names often taken in vain by critics seeking respectability for the movies) Kafka plus Ionesco with touches of Joyce, and at the same time paints a four-dimensional moving picture of life in Poland. An astonishing
film, and the only one that presented any genuine intellectual challenge to its audience--as opposed to the sucker-traps of spurious complexity to be found, for example, in the Czech offering, Diamonds of the Night.
In the commercial free-for-all of the Film Market one could see a nice moral comedy, Luigi Comencini's La Hugiarda, an equally nice immoral comedy, Jean Aurel's De l'Arnour, in- spired by Stendhal, and a version of Thomas l'Imposteur. which belongs neither to Cocteau nor to its director, Georges Franju, and is damaged by Emmanuele Riva. Also Agnes Varda's long commercial for marriage and children. Le Bonheur. photographed in such yummy colour that sometimes everyone on the screen 'seemed on the point of turning to candy. Last, and possibly in the long run most important, was Path l'Id par . . produced by an ex-C'ahiers du Cinema critic: Barbet Schroeder. He had persuaded half a dozen directors including Godard and Chabrol to make episodes in 16 mm, colour, the low cost of which would allow the freedom that is becoming less avail- able in the French film industry. The results. are all very personal but never less than interest- ing, and the best episodes are excellent- Chabrol's grotesque family (in which he plays the father) and Jean Douchet's anecdote about an American girl in St. Germain-des-Pres which is shot with the 'witty economy that characterises the best American comedies. One of our small and cowardly group of 'art' cinemas would do• well to show enough enterprise to pick up this movie.
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