Cinema Canada (May 1976)

beyond fiction into a rarefied world of its own. It is among the greatest movies I have ever seen. Brittain is no newcomer to films (see Cinema Canada no. 15 pp. 3640). Over the years, his films have won just about every prize given to documentaries around the world. They all have the Brittain touch — extremely well structured with a fine appreciation for the foibles of man, his contradictions as well as his genius. Brittain has a gossip’s attention to human detail, his interviews start where other documentaries leave off — the pauses, the asides, and the revealing little glimmers which go beyond the words being spoken. In the narration of Brittain’s films you get still more details feeding the curiosity, with its “scorpion sting”’ construction such that it can backtrack on itself and catch you unawares. In building up a film, this same element of surprise is maintained. Throwing the curves as he calls it, he juggles whatever he is dealing with — past and present, fantasy and fiction, and changes in location — with such dexterity that you are never bored, you never know what’s coming next. With the story of Lowry, Brittain’s multifaceted technique has come to its climax. The filmed portrait of Malcolm Lowry hits us from many directions. There is the interview with Lowry’s only living brother, Russell; years of pent-up frustration living with this irresponsible, lying, destructive and ultimately embarrassing family legend pour out in an intimate confession to the camera. A school chum, now an old man, tells how Lowry once wrote a song punctuated with a stanza of farts. “Quite remarkable, you know, that he was able to do it at will.” Dr. Michael Raymond, his psychiatrist at the British mental institution where he spent much of his last three years, talks about an attempt at inducing an 48/Cinema Canada aversion reaction to alcohol. ““He was a very meticulous man and used to wash the vomit off his hands with the glass of milk we would give him afterwards.” An_ ancient schoolteacher declaiming from the front of a classroom remembers that Lowry used to slouch. And finally, his wife/mother Margerie to whom the film is dedicated, describing the heartrending details of their poisoned, blessed life together. Lowry struggled with the manuscript of Under the Volcano through three countries and five drafts for eight tortured years. As Brittain’s narration succinctly puts it, “It cost him everything, but in the critical judgment of many, it was no waste.” But it was Lowry’s literary success that proved to be his final undoing. “Fame is like a drunk; it consumes the house of the soul, exposing that you have worked for only this.” Cut to the academics busily at work four biographies and 127 doctoral theses later. The black frocks and tweed jackets natter knowingly to each other about how he crosses his Ts in the last chapter of the third draft. But this film does more than just show us how other people have regarded this literary genius. In many ways, Volcano is by Lowry as well as being about him. Brittain and researcher Bob Duncan spent two weeks in Mexico in search of Lowry images. What they have come up with are not literal images from the book, but pictures of Mexico that drill into the subconscious. The Mexico in the heart that Lowry talks about become the unerasable images of all our dreams. Through an_ all-seeing, all-feeling alcoholic haze, the filmmaker, Brittain, the author and the narrator, Richard Burton, have achieved a form of communion — a transubstantiation in which the words and the images have become living flesh. There is a group of Mexican financiers who have bought the film rights for the novel Under the Volcano. The book is considered a hot property and was sold for many thousand dollars. Joseph Losey, Orson Wells and other heavies are being considered as possible directors of this future epic. I wish them luck, but I fear that they have been scooped. No actors, no makeup, no lighting or set construction will ever be able to match the reality of this film: the banal, the human, the terrifying and touching document of one man’s life — of all our lives. Ronald H. Blumer Joan Lefebcre’s L’amour blesse d: Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, asst. d: Robert Faveaur, ph: J.C. Tremblay, ed: Marguerite Duparc, sd: Jacques Blain, 1.p: Louise Cuerrier and the voices of Gilles Proulx, Paul Baillargeon, Pierre Curzi, Frédérique Collin, Jean-Guy Moreau, Monique Mercure, Denise Morelle, p: Marguerite Duparc, p.e: Cinak, 1975, col: 35 mm, running time: 78 minutes, dist.: Disci. Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, Quebec’s most prolific and independent producer-filmmaker, has finished his 14th feature, a film built on sound. Lefebvre’s film is as stark visually as it is rich and subtle aurally. It is a film which includes the audience and which counts upon its intelligence and interest to fill out the spaces and the silences he provides. Wounded Love has only one actress, one lonely woman, home alone on a Friday night, listening to a “‘hotline’ program on the radio. Others are present, but only as sounds. The radio provides the leitmotif of the woman’s loneliness when it is not playing the central role itself. The advertisements, the announcers, the people who call in and their problems are the stuff of her evening. There are also the neighbors who are fighting and whom she hears through the wall, her mother-in-law, her estranged husband on the phone, and the pizza deliveryman to whom she does not open the door. Nothing happens. Not even the camera moves much. Lefebvre is content to hold the image and to let the woman walk in and out of the frame as if her lassitude has affected the whole crew. She does her nails, bathes and listens. She is alone and defeated. The tabloid papers and the sensational hot-lines keep her company and create the sensation of excitement, of something unusual. In a brief moment of rebellion, she herself phones the hot-line to protest the announcer’s cavalier reaction to another woman who wonders whether she should leave her husband. Our lady knows. She has been beaten by her own husband and has left him. She wants to encourage the caller but can’t explain why the freedom she fought for should result in such loneliness and desperation. Unable to make her point,