Two Festivals
Apu in London
By DEREK HILL
THE London Film Festival scrapes along on a budget of £900—compared to the £60,000 Cannes frolic—and scarcely a nod of government recognition. The general absence of stars, industry representatives and critics tends to obscure the fact that this is the most valuable of all international festivals and probably the most important annual event in the cinema anywhere in the world. The National Film Theatre's presentation of the pick of all other festivals, together with a few special selections, gives audiences an otherwise impossible chance to see the best of current world cinema. (Only nine of the twenty-six features at this year's festival are sure of commercial distribution.)
The Festival's most positive film was Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu, ludicrously rejected by a Venice which preferred to accept The Boy and the Bridge. This last part of the great trilogy which began with Pallier Panchali opens with Apu leaving his university. He tells a friend of his plans for a novel about a man who never achieves his dream of greatness but still succeeds as a man by living life to the full. Attending a country wedding where the bridegroom is dis- covered to be insane, Apu allows himself to be substituted to save the girl from the curse believed to follow if she does not marry at the appointed hour. 'I thought it would be something noble to do,' he tells her lamely, convincingly. Their marriage turns out to be a miracle of under- standing and soon of love. When his wife dies in childbirth Apu destroys his novel and for five years refuses to see his son. Then, painfully, he realises his responsibilities and takes the boy with him in one of the richest, most affirmative con- clusions the cinema has known.
Ray's work has grown in stature throughout the trilogy, particularly in the sheer density of each scene. The love between Apu and his wife is developed in delicate, perfect fragments—a hairpin in a pillow, a routine of morning chores, an English lesson, a station parting. Ray's great power is in finding the true drama in the seem- ingly undramatic. His selection seems almost casual, yet a relationship of extraordinary com- plexity is established in half a dozen shots, a whole life in a gesture and a' line or two of dialogue.
Several films concluded with equally hopeful, often refreshingly romantic, images. Francois Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups ends with its twelve-year-old hero, on the run from a reform school, gazing at the sea he has never seen. The shot freezes, fixing the moment of liberation. The boy's defiance has vanished. We don't know for how long he's safe; but the rebellion bred by parents and teacher and hardened by the reform school hasn't yet distorted the spirit behind it. Truffaut's approach is not unlike Ray's. He, too, finds tragedy and humour not in mere plot but in details -- a child putting out garbage, a school essay, a family visit to the cinema. '11: I'd put the
script up to anyone in the industry,' he told me last week, 'they'd have wanted to know where the plot was. Only two things happen in the film. The boy sees his mother with her lover, and he steals a typewriter.'
Mercifully Les Quatre Cents Coups was made outside the industry and shot largely in the streets of Paris without a single studio scene. This and Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (shown a year ago at the National Film Theatre) are the two most dis- tinguished productions of the nouvelle vague so far seen in this country.
Among these great shouts of hope and promise only one film sounded a wail of real despair. Conflagration, adapted from the Japanese best- seller recently published in Britain, concerns a young student living in a monastery who gradu- ally discovers the people he idolises to be as corrupt as those he despises. Even the Golden Pavilion of the Shukaku Temple, to him not merely the most beautiful thing on earth but the symbol of all his ideals, is to be exploited for the tourist trade. He burns it to the ground, and flings himself from the train taking him to seven years' imprisonment. Ken Ichikawa's direction is restrained, but not so distant that it hides the depth of his sympathy. Corruption, he gently insists, has made this world impossible for the pure idealist.
And that other idealist, the priest who wanders through Bunuel's Nazarin? Here was the one great enigma of the Festival, a film apparently more simply handled than any other, even sub-
duing the usual exhibitionism of its cameraman, Gabriel Figueroa, to tell a story of exceptional profundity. After unsuccessfully sheltering a prostitute wanted for murder, a Mexican priest is strongly criticised by the Church. His attempts to follow his ideals lead to one disaster after another. An effort at manual labour provokes the death of at least one man. He becomes involved in a hysterical orgy of miracle-working at a sick girl's bedside. Two women disciples dog his reluctant footsteps, one superstitiously, one for personal love. In a plague-stricken village a dying woman refuses his prayers. Imprisoned, he s beaten by one man and saved by another who hopes to steal his money. Just as he seems about to doubt his way of suffering, a woman selling fruit offers him some as a gift without knowing he is a priest. He refuses for a moment, then, to a sudden, urgent, drumbeat, accepts. 'God be with you,' says the woman, and his tortured face, filled with a new awareness, passes to leave an empty screen.
An awareness, of what, though? That his way, the religious way, has been wrong? That this is his first meeting with the real, human charity? The NFT bars buzzed with interpretations. Those drumbeats—weren't they the same as those that concluded Bunuel's 1930 L'Age d'Or? The priest's journey—could it be meant to symbolise the Church's journey through time leaving a wake of killing and destruction? Was there a symbol in the gift of fruit trim woman to man? And what was the significance of the strange affection between disciple and dwarf? The questions throbbed through the Festival fortnight as steadily as the final drumbeats. Their persistence proved the power of Nazarin. But isn't there something wrong with a film which allows inter- pretations which must be the opposite of the director's intentions?
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