Distributors' Showcase

The New York Film Festival shows signs of becoming a kind of Pre-Vue Theater. There are no winners or losers, since no prizes are given. Over half of the 23 films presented this year at Lincoln Center will show up in regular theaters soon (in some cases only days) after their festival screening. Begun seven years ago as a showcase for the choice of the European festivals, New York's staid and sometimes pompous affair has thus each year become more and more a distributors' proving ground. Oddly enough, the attitude of the festival's sponsors doesn't seem to affect the quality of the films. A few are first-rate; many more are mannered mediocrities indicative of modish trends (fragmentation of narrative, alienation effects), rather than genuine worth. A few notable early entries:

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is a sniggering Hollywood send-up of infidelity, wife-swapping and other variations on the theme of modern marriage. For Writers Paul Mazursky (who also directed) and Larry Tucker (who produced), satire is more often a matter of condescension than wit. These swimming-pool Swifts smugly mock a situation that they simultaneously exploit. Bob (Robert Gulp) is a documentary-film maker who, after telling his wife Carol (Natalie Wood) that he has had a casual affair with another woman, listens with surprised gratification as she begs, "Let me hear about it again. I feel closer to you than I ever have in my whole life." Their two best friends, Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon), after being let in on the news, are initially puzzled, then attracted by this easy permissiveness until, at film's end, the two couples wind up in bed together at a Las Vegas hotel. There they seem to come to their middle-class senses in a denouement that is the biggest cop-out since Sidney Poitier appeared as the world's whitest black man in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Mazursky's direction is impersonal and, at best, functional; his idea of good cinematography is getting everyone in focus and lighting the scene as if it were being shot inside a toaster. A few episodes (a session with a preoccupied psychiatrist, or an attempted seduction after a late-night party) do arouse tremors of mirth. There is some valid spoofing of people who try to live by the elusive non-standards of "situation ethics" (whether or not they have heard of the term) and who only end up in situation comedy. They cannot really tell an orgy from a "sensitivity" session--and neither, unfortunately, can the film's authors, who ought to go see the skit about wholesome swingers in that succes de scandale Off-Broadway, Oh! Calcutta! The dialogue remains flaccid throughout, badly in need of the kind of cutting edge that Billy Wilder could have given it. What Mazursky and Tucker obviously had in mind was a sophisticated, controversial comedy, but their work suggests that sex is too important to be left to Hollywood. Why B&C&T&A was chosen to open a presumably serious film festival on the gala first night is a mystery understood only by the program committee.

It is as if Ingmar Bergman awoke from a tortured sleep, seized a camera and began to film what he had just been dreaming. Reality is distorted and logic becomes madness in The Ritual, Bergman's most nightmarish fantasy since The Silence. In the claustrophobic office of some anonymous bureaucrat, three actors (Ingrid Thulin, Anders Ek and Gunnar Boeornstrand) perform a bizarre masque, part psychodrama, part sexual charade. They are like the mummers from The Seventh Seal or the circus performers from The Naked Night imprisoned in an allegory of doom. Inevitably the object of the masque is death. But the dramatic value of the ritual itself is disappointingly slight, giving the entire film an air of anticlimax. There are episodes of typical genius--one of the actors sits in a bed flipping matches from between his teeth until he finally incinerates himself--but Bergman has not quite managed to correlate fantasy and personal drama. Shot originally as a television play, The Ritual contents itself with suggesting a kind of scenario for what will perhaps become a more fully realized Bergman fantasy.

If Susan Sontag's prose style is laborious, her film making is absolutely benumbing. Duet for Cannibals, which looks alternately like a third-rate Monogram thriller and a dirty soap opera, has something to do with a young man who gets a job as secretary to a paranoid politician. "He's full of fantasies of persecution and disaster," the lad confides to his mistress, who eventually winds up in bed between the boss and his crazy wife. At film's end, characters die and are reborn again with a facility that suggests that Director Sontag is not without a sense of humor, an absolute prerequisite for anyone who is determined to sit through this movie. As befits the author of a book entitled Against Interpretation, Miss Sontag's first film lends itself to a variety of esoteric explications, all of them probably invalid. Since she is a member of the program committee, perhaps she will stay around after the show and explain it all.

"He expresses himself cinematically, as a poet does with a pen," said Jean Cocteau of Robert Bresson. "There is a huge barrier between his greatness, his silence, his commitment and his dreams, and the world in which they are mistaken for stumbling and obsession." Une Femme Douce, Bresson's newest film, may go some small way toward razing the barrier. Adapted from a Dostoevski novella about the suicide of a young bride, Une Femme Douce finds Bresson dealing once again with the corruption of innocence, a theme that has dominated his work from Diary of a Country Priest to last year's Mouchette. For the first time, however, his central character is something more than a passive, symbolic victim. Her suicide is portrayed as a positive act of defiance, not desperation. Bresson's customary stylistic austerity seems softened by his first use of color film, but what Franc,ois Truffaut called his "theoretical, mathematical, musical and above all ascetic" approach to the cinema may still seem much too calculated for most viewers. Objects for Bresson are as important as his characters, and he lingers on prolonged shots of doors, stairways and display cases. Still, Une Femme Douce will probably prove to be his most accessible film. It is also the best the festival has offered so far.

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