Take One (Nov-Dec 1972)

said that Harris’s journey is a descent into hell, since hell implies the absence of God, and God implies Law. Harris’s initial lawfulness indicates a faith in principles, and principles, first and foremost, are abstractions. By forsaking abstractions, he necessarily becomes godless, since the concept of God is the primal abstraction. The relationship between Harris and Lettieri is also worthy of analysis. Both are law men, but one is in his homeland, the other a stranger. Lettieri’s morality is roughly midway between the extremes represented by Taylor and Harris. He does not espouse the non-violent ideals of Harris, but neither does he indulge in the rabid violence of Taylor. As Harris’s morality approximates Taylor's, Lettieri’s moral position becomes more crucial to the structure of the film, for he acts as a foil to Harris. Lettieri represents the last vestige of reason in an _ irrational cosmos. Significantly, he is the only main character left alive at the end of the film. It is difficult to discern just who deserves the lion’s share of credit for The Deadly Trackers, but Samuel Fuller and Lukas Heller should be tabbed for major contributions. The formal structure and contradictions of character evident in Fuller's films are clearly at work in the story, and the moral ambiguities _ scriptwriter Heller dealt with in some of Aldrich’s best films are also apparent. The performances and direction are equal to the task but not outstanding. An interesting footnote to The Deadly Trackers: Jerry Fielding’s music score contains the same themes he used in The Wild Bunch. One could conveniently conclude that this reprise represents an attempt to impose the moral sensibilities of Peckinpah on The Deadly Trackers, but more than likely it was an economy move on the part of Warner Brothers. Recycled scores doubtless cost less than originals. Frank Jackson Showdown Rimmer, Braidwood, LeeNova, Wilson, Razutis, Roxborough, Tougas, Bryant, Small. The West Coast Film rogerams available for exhibition. Half-hour film Write for your free catalogue! PACIFIC Cinémathéque PACIFIQUE 1145 West Georgia Street Vancouver 5 Canada THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE A New Yorker Films release of an Elite Filmes, Cine Qua Non, Les Films du Losange, Simar Film, V.M. Production co-production. Director and Screenplay: Jean Eustache. Executive Producer: Pierre Cottrell. Photography: Pierre L’'homme. Cast: Bernadette Lafont, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Frangoise Lebrun, Isabelle Weingarten, Jacques Renard, Jean-Noel Picq. 215 mins. Seen this film twice. Will see it many more times. Have ‘phoned my friends to tell them about it; have relived it often in my mind, all the while realizing that, with a film so true to the mysterious center of our lives, to recapitulate its narrative, to attempt to describe its “events” is to distance rather than to focus on what it is that makes it one of the most powerful films I’ve seen in years. The film’s elements are deceptively simple, soap-opera-like in its narrative of a love quadrangle. Alexandre (JeanPierre Léaud) lives with, is kept by, an “older” woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), the proprietor of a small, chic Pari sian boutique. But Alexandre loves Gil-. berte (Isabelle Weingarten), a student younger than himself who has jilted him and gone off with a more substantial fellow, a man she plans to marry. To Gilberte, Alexandre is the supplicant for the return of their lost love; to Marie, Alexandre is the boyish wastrel, a café-habitué, a Charming sponge. Nothing unusual about this classic triangle, nothing extraordinary about its Participants, except for their seeming self-awareness (the greatest delusion), their ability to articulate their situation. Marie tells Alexandre that she has opted for a love that may be less passionate than what they had once shared, but that sexual love alone is not sufficient to sustain a marriage. Alexandre in turn cogently analyses the economic and class roots of her decision to marry, insists that the very foundation of middle-class mar riage is decayed, that she is building her life on decay. Their conversation forms the centre of several of the film’s major themes (the dichotomy between reason and feeling, the meaning and forms of love), themes developed with a muted, inexorable logic. This is not to say that the film is passionless, but the passion is restrained, anti-erotic, anti-romantic, as to make you feel you are little more than a collection of tropisms skinned over with two thousand years of cultural veneer — the rationalizations employed just to get through the day in one piece but which, finally, are worthless in the face of impulse and instinct. Perhaps this idea is yet another form of romanticism, but in Eustache’s treatment it has none of the qualities of the idyl or the sentimental. Men and women do not long for one another to the accompaniment of a Gato Barbieri soundtrack; there are no secret rendezvous in hermetic love lairs. In The Mother and the Whore love-making is often farcical, unglamorous. Alexandre, for example, is mad for his own conversation, has much time to practise and perfect it in his café day: words are his charm and his power. When he commences a relationship with Veronika, a young nurse he has picked up in a café, he waxes lyrical, strains for originality in an attempt to seduce her. She listens quietly, neither impressed nor bored, and tells him finally, that she has a good face, pretty breasts, and not much time to waste. Alexandre is deflated, the male ego-bag pierced, the romantic scam shattered. Veronika (Francoise Lebrun) is a mixture of liberated and dependent woman, complex enough in characterization to be at once vacuous, soul-less, a pathetic psychic and sexual drifter, and Frederic Tuten, Assistant Professor of English at The City University of New York, has written for Vogue and the New York Times, as well as being the author of the novel, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow_in Creative Fiction.