In a Temple of Illusions

The Balcony. The first brothel was a temple. In antiquity the Mother Goddess was worshiped in the person of the sacred prostitute. Today the idea of erotic relations between heaven and earth persists in the fantasies of a frightening Frenchman named Jean Genet, an abandoned child who became successively a thief, a prostitute, a convict, and the most ferociously brilliant poet now at work in the French theater of the absurd. In The Balcony, a drama that resembles both a burlesque show and a Black Mass. Genet expounds his fantasies in a monstrous metaphor: the world is a vast brothel operated by an infernal, supernal, eternal Madam who sells her customers illusions in return for the surrender of their masculinity.

The film version of the play, produced in Hollywood for $200,000, is relentlessly funny, shaggy, shocking. A revolution is raging as the picture begins. Society is collapsing, but prostitution is undisturbed. "Sometimes as a theater, sometimes as a church." the Madam (Shelley Winters) proclaims, "this house will always be here." In the film the house is situated in a film studio, in a pavilion of illusions. One chamber is arranged as a hall of justice: in it an office worker, satanic in black robes, buys the illusion that he is a judge and cruelly extracts a confession of a prostitute (Ruby Dee). A second chamber is arranged as a chapel: in it a gas-meter reader, in miter and chasuble, buys the illusion that he is a bishop and lovingly receives a confession of a prostitute. A third chamber is arranged as a stable: in it a milkman, bristling with chest lettuce, buys the illusion that he is a cavalry general and prepares to mount his whorse.

Enter the local strongman (Peter Falk). The rebels, he says, are winning. The real chief justice, the real archbishop, the real general are dead. Why not substitute the counterfeit dignitaries, the world of illusion for the world of reality? He does, and illusion works just as well as reality. The rebels are defeated.

At this point, Genet's play dissolves hideously into myth: the immortal myth of the new king who conquers the old king, and then celebrates his marriage to the Mother Goddess with a rite of self-castration. The rebel leader comes to the brothel, buys the illusion that he is the strongman, and at the climax of his impersonation mutilates himself. To delete this episode is to castrate the drama. The moviemakers delete it and the play ends not with a scream but a snigger.

In earlier scenes, however, the low jinks are vigorous and apropos. Genet has a gruesomely pictorial sense of humor ("Is the archbishop dead?"--"I hope so. His head is tied to the handlebars of a little boy's bicycle") and Scenarist Ben Maddow has a cute wit of his own ("The world is full of whores, but a good bookkeeper is hard to find"). Too often, unhappily, the film is cute where the play was poetic, too often Director Joseph Strick permits his performers to natter what they are intended to intone. But moments of lurid lyricism survive, and vestiges of atavistic ritual. Genet is not, pace Sartre, a sick saint. He is a perfectly healthy witch doctor, and when he chooses he can cast a potent spell.

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