Take One (Oct 1976)

| think by now we've come to expect a bit more than a slow slide into technical ly proficient monotony from Roeg. Performance and Don’t Look Back (and to some extent Walkabout) were rather gleeful expositions on the fractious perils of living. Roeg’s world, its time and space, is fragmented, more often shattered, his characters inevitably getting slashed on the shards. Until The Man Who Fell to Earth, we've shared Roeg’s mordant glee. We've enjoyed watching the brutalities of contemporary dislocation because it’s famous well-paid actors falling through the cracks in civilization’s sidewalks instead of us. The Man Who Fell to Earth wants to imply these earthly pitfalls must be doubly jarring to one from another planet; this implication, though, is quickly contradicted by Newton — after he’s been kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured — telling an earthling, “We'd probably have treated you the same if you'd come over to our place.” For a film as gimmicked up (to borrow from the script, “technologically overstimulated”) as this one, there are fewer and fewer distractions to ease the viewer along the way. Certainly the greatest pleasure comes from identifying old movies on the banks of television screens Newton loves to watch, figuring out what ironies in the already over-italicized screenplay the old films underline: Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper parting in Love in the Afternoon while Newton and his very earthbound girlfriend (Candy Clark) quarrel; Alida Valli and Joseph Cotton discussing Harry Lime’s perfidy in The Third Man just before the professor betrays Newton; Terence Stamp shouting “God Bless Captain Vere” in Billy Budd prior to Newton's semi-martyrdom. The actors we want to watch have too little to do — Rip Torn ambles about displaying his paunch and some new tics — and Candy Clark, amusing at first, does too damned much as the film progresses (her Judy Holliday whine is pretty good, the Barbara Harris dumb chick wearing, the working-class fright wigs we've seen too many times on Karen Black). Bowie himself is properly enigmatic and understated. His emaciated face, an almost featureless flatness at times, has an uncanny chameleon quality to it. He looks alternately like Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Conformist (a slashbrimmed hat helps), the Duke of Windsor when he was still the Prince of Wales, and Candy Clark in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg does a whole trashy series of Persona-type close-ups with the two made up to look alike). The Persona close-ups are worth mentioning too because they form a symptom rather than an exception: there is so much in The Man Who Fell to Earth that is attempted/copied/parodied and then simply cast aside. Little is followed through, less looked into. Homages and thefts are dropped for recognition, our delectation — and nothing more. Case in point: Newton's dry planet reminds us Roeg photographed the deserts for Lawrence of Arabia, redefined how wastelands can be filmed (think of Antonioni’s desert sequences in The Passenger and Zabriskie Point), and yet here when we see Newton's family at home, we have Mondo Cane melodrama about the way they die for want of water and Earth's selfishness. Smugness substitutes for a startling view of another world. (I’m determined to get through all this without once mentioning Kubrick.) Roeg leaves the Brueghel/Icarus parallel dangling, and although he gets the ugliness and abundance (ugly beCause abundant, endlessly replicated) of American things — hotel rooms and television sets and watercolors from Woolworth’s, Indian turquoise and _ silver jewelry in lusterless heaps — The Man Who Fell to Earth merely adds to the American heap. Brueghel gives us a world so cluttered with activity, the fall of a waxwinged man goes unremarked. But Brueghel gives us a vision of the overwhelming busy-ness of living, a vision of impending chaos. Roeg gives us clutter. A Gallic Yoknapatawpha Joe Blades reviews French Provincial Directed by André Téchiné A remarkable thing happened when | saw Souvenirs d’en France: | stayed for two consecutive screenings. No, | didn't fall asleep first time around. | sat twice through — enduring a pair of dopey travelogues — in order to bask in the presence of genius again, right away. Souvenirs d’en France (U.S. title, French Provincial) satisfies, _ initially, due to its story line. Its texture is that of a fine novel. In content, but in content only, it is the most Faulkner-like film I've seen. The tale, conceived by the gifted young director, André Teéchiné, deals with the toppling of an_ influential aristocratic family living not in the Old South but in southwestern France. The filmmaker charts the decay of the household. By the end of the picture, the rot is so stifling you can almost smell it. Here is The Sound and the Fury transported to Gallic climes, complete with erosion of heritage and social structure. (The cast is phenomenal. Jeanne Moreau and MarieFrance Pisier, by virtue of their central roles, are standouts; but there is virtuoso acting by nearly everyone.) Ultimately, however, the film’s source is the nouveau roman tradition of Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and, in America, Susan Sontag. In Parisian literary circles, these writers are lumped together as l'école du regard because of their concentration on minute detail. The tag is a good one. As with those generally accomplished artists, Téchiné’s obsessions are time, material objects, and memory; he, too, de-emphasizes psychology to Green (Ohio) University, is a free-lance writer based in New York. explain character predominantly through outward behavior. On the surface, everything appears scaled-down, skeleton-bare. This literary school is a natural for the movies, where the order (or disorder) of the human mind can be conveyed in purely pictorial terms. Indeed, the nouvelle roman has breatned screen life long before now, most notably in Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad; but never has the result been so compelling. What Souvenirs d’en France does with cinema form is a major achievement. One learns about the protagonists’ lives by catching at the shadows of their day-to-day existence. The film runs a short 91 minutes, and the curious sensation (a sensation only; we realize it’s not fact) is that Téchiné shot a more complete version, then eliminated all establishing shots, all rising action, all confrontation scenes — and retained only those passages just prior to and after crises. The filmmaker dispenses with virtually all traditional dramatic imperatives. Consequently, throughout, it takes a moment to adjust to what’s going on, to what has happened that we didn't see, to how many years have passed (there are no intertitles identifying dates, although the movie spans a period roughly from 1937 to 1970, with one flashback to the first of the century). Marriages dissolve. A world war rages. Political and industrial empires rise, then crumple. People die. But all this information is presented obliquely. Téchine and his co-scenarist, Marilyn Goldin, create an entertainment not unlike a series of tableaux. The approach is decidedly antimelodramatic — even more importantly, antidramatic. One wonders that Souvenirs d’en France has any impact at all. Yet it does, for two principal reasons. First, Téchiné's selectivity is very apt. True, he skeletonizes his story, but the absent moments in 39