Take One (Jul 15, 1979)

familiarity with the “rules” of the genre. We're conditioned to expect the captain to be a hero: we're left considerably unnerved when Dallas becomes one of the monster's earliest victims. Similarly, the characters we have been conditioned to see as the most vulnerable (the women, especially the fragile terrified Lambert) or the most expendable (Parker, who ten years ago would have served no other dramatic purpose than that of the token black), survive the longest. And what appears to be a routine confrontation, between overwrought crew members—a heated argument between Ripley and the scientist Ash—develops suddenly into the most mesmerizing, perverse and horrible encounter in the film. As portrayed by the tall, angular and serious Sigourney Weaver, Ripley is a provocative example of feminine courage at its rowdiest, able to hold her own ina _temperamental brawl with her male colleagues. And as the last human survivor, she becomes a powerful symbol of human reason caught up in a limbo of seductive irrationality. By the last reel of Alien, survival itself is no longer an issue; O'Bannon and Scott drive us into such a frenzy that the notion of flinging ourselves in the monster’s teeth begins to seem like an almost ecstatic release from this terrible anxiety. That Ripley manages to resist this temptation to the end is the | all the more disturbing. .movie's last and best surprise. In one great scene the alien brilliantly ‘ But such psychological teasing and | camouflages itself within the complex taunting aside, Alien scores the highest | hardware of a control panel, a marks for its pure visual impact. With | provocative symbol of the machine-asScott’s reputation as a_ perfectionist | monster that becomes the film’s secondirector who also serves as his own | dary motif—a motif that is paid off when cinematographer, the film assumes a | Ripley discovers that the presence of the beguiling texture of claustrophobic | alien on board, far from accidental, is the eeriness. There is something vaguely | result of cold complicity between the disturbing and yet highly enticing in the institutionalized curiosity of the scientist sinister eroticism of the alien planet (also| Ash and the detached impersonal designed by Giger), and the huge | precision with which Mother runs the fossilized gunner in his rotting cockpit is a | ship. wildly surrealist vision of bone and tissue For all its gothic overtones, Alien is a perversely fused with mechanical hard| masterwork of speculative fiction that ware. By contrast, the Nostromo interiors | offers a plausible vision of our future in (designed by O'Bannon and fantasy | space, lending a cautionary note to the artists Chris Foss and Ron Cobb) are a| prospect of runaway technology while at study in technology, efficiency modified | the same time reviving our curiosity with messy working-class domesticity. | about space travel. And it dares to Everything from the grubbily | suggest that our future, like our past, will ‘sophisticated equipment to the | not be defined by heroic adventurers, but | marvelously functional unisex fatigues | by ordinary hard-working folks going worn by the crew suggests a well-worn | about their business as they have done for and, not incidentally, asexual prac-| centuries. Cinemaphiles of all persuasions ticality. This crew has no time for the silly | -owe it to themselves to see Alien at least /shipboard romances that have] twice, once for the cheap thrills, and characterized so many other cinematic | again to be swept into the wonderland of space voyages, and the businesslike | its special movie magic. nature of their personal relationships makes the throbbingly organic, occasionally phallic appearance of the alien Lisa Jensen is a free-lance writer based in Northern California. Les Rendez-vous d’Anna Glum is beautiful By Jonathan Rosenbaum Chantal Akerman is a tough filmmaker to tangle with, make one’s mind up about or describe. One thing’s clear enough though: Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, her fifth feature, is the most assertive film by a woman that I’ve seen since Marguerite Duras’ Le Camion—and probably the most accessible that Akerman has made to date. It might wind up serving-as a calling card for the rest of her work. A film that assumes the ambition (and pretention) of taking the pulse of Western Europe while pursuing a narcissistic autobiographical meditation obviously isn’t going to win everyone over—particularly when every shot has the visual weight of a battleship and nearly every facial expression has enough glumness to sink one. Take that, Akerman seems to be saying, offering up yet ; f iit i & another drab, anonymous hotel room or i 14) itil f i train station at night, each one lit with | Unified by common banality, loving the everyday—a Buster Keaton film for the ‘70s? TAKE ONE 9