Healthy glow in the tum

by Michael Heath

One autumnally rich day, drenched in gold and amber and rustic (healthily enhanced by a smattering of toy train whistle, and gentle pastorallic cow bells) an openaired landau driven by two sinister blackbirds, and containing an honest looking married couple, comes driving into the lens of the camera. Credits flit by, the effect is glowing in the turn already. The landau stops, the girl is dragged screaming to a tree in the forest, the blackbirds rolls up their sleeves and on a nod from the husband, the now half naked wife is roped to the tree and whipped -all rather like a Ross Hunter/Nemec beget-together. But this is the great Luis Bunuel, now aged 68, an acknowledged alcoholic, half blind, and his latest film, Belle de Jour (N.Z.F.S.). Such a tidy sophisticated trollic, and expensive joke, I assume, and a film so honestly moving in its lamentably poignant adagio-mood, I didn't know if. I was e e cumming or Geering. What I do know is that it is based on a novel of the same name by Joseph Kessel, and modified severely from same, so we can leave that alone for a start.

It is all very well to say that this great master of the surrealist cinema has been working for years in hidden undertones and symbols, and in this film, achieves such an "archectonic whole", it is his finest and most mature work. How the hell would I know. All very humm haa, and furtively snoring off during Rebellion of the Hanged, which at least had thumb screwing, which on paper sounds (at least) ridiculous. Eric Rhode says in the BBC Listener "Someone coming to Luis Bunuel's work for the first time would be disconcerted by Belle de Jour: not by its clearly told story, but Bunuel s seemingly noncommittal attitude to its subject." Too true.

Of course you'll wonder what the hell it is anyway, and most of you won't be seeing it at all, but to please myself, and give it a fair hearing (wheelchairs are definitely in), it is worth nothing (for those addicts of Salient file treasuries) the history of Bunuel in this place. This university's Film Society, in the days of Cousin, White and Eveready, imported Un Chien Andalou, and it received a few breasty teste cuts from our Walter Gnashers. The film flude back on its own!

Scraping the daunty lamentex of divisional-harms hearty artists, came news that The Young One, (1960) was available here, and it had a small run at the Princess. In english and shorter than Mort de, it was a necessary metaphorical nursery curse on an animalistic atoll.

Someone spoke up that The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) was helped here by the bogus exotics in the Fedup of Orations Sillyastes. And no one remembers that one. Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre (1963, with Moreau) was the best banned in the land-slobbery and gum horror. Hot cross Bunuel.

Getting back to Belle de Jour (which I do when side tracked by the artist's Histoire d'ough rave by me). The story is of Severine (Catherine Deneuve, beauty beyond dull care) who is married to Pierre (Jean Sorel), and is tormented by "masochistic fantasies." She applies at a superb brothel, run by Madame Anais-of the Dido and -ilk (Genevieve Page, who was Montand's wife in Grand Prix-a performance of alarming control and vivisectional beauty). A young cruel thug Marcel (Pierre Clementi) falls in love with Severine (her fleeting part-time activity earns her the name of Belle de Jour) and eventually shoots her husband. She nurses the speechless, wheelchair-ridden Pierre and the sound of cow bells etc, causes him to rise from the chair and say, "Let's take a vacation, go to the mountains."

Severine looks out the window, "do you hear?" and we see the landau once more moving towards us in the autumn light. The camera barely moves for a minute on the leaves of the ground. The film ends.

It is really a film strewn with gags and auto-suggestive foe-paths; Bunuel, at the expense of his horrified critics (in Paris on first release last year, it caused an unprecedented amount of spontaneous bitching and increduity) has pitched in all his loving care and tendres of mood, to allow an open interpretation of reality and unreality-unfortunately helping us in the roman and italic alternating subtitles, but occasionally even they were a stenchless form of herring-rouge.

The film has been auto-censored. Cuts were made before the producers submitted it to the French censors. Severine is picked up at an alfresco cafe (we see Bunuel and a little Hakim nogging at a table!) by a puffy Hammer-looking Duke and in the same landau (driven by the same blackbirds), they encage in a ritual at a castle. She is dressed in a synthetic black negligee and is covered in asphodels, lying in a coffin. The Duke descends under it, and the coffin rocks. Severine stares horrified. (Snip snip.)

At the ski resort (establishing-shots run gammy here) with friends (Macha Meril, looking divine) she and Michel Piccoli disappear under a table with a broken bottle. Table rocks, snip snip.

Bunuel says the film is a pornographic film, by which he means chaste eroticism. It is so very chaste and unbiasedly sexless,"yet erotic, and the effect pornographic." (John Simon would like that for his annals!)

There are all the references one needs to note its healthy chaste bourgeois atmosphere. The clients at the brothel are all old and peculiarly endowed, by which I mean there is a professor who calls for an ink bottle, a gynaecologist with his little de Sade-inspired whipping playlet, the tundrous Japanese gentleman who tries to pay with a geisha diners card (he has a black box that buzzes!) and Marcel in his black leather coat and tin teeth.

There is no feeling in it, no quantity of despair or hate for anyone, yet they are each controlled, and their mannerisms and pity, if any, are kept buried inside them. We never get to know anything about Severine. But the film seems to linger. Burnt ochres and the pastel rooms (the photography of Sacha Vierny-Resnais uses him consistently-seems to catch all colours in mid-flight), the superb clothing, noises of feet, cowbells, sleigh bells, mewwings. There is no music. It is damnably funny at times; giggly brittle tones of sadly moving people, in and out of puppetry, synthesised "dirty business' in the streets of Paris.

But little informs us, or reminds us that this is the great Luis Bunuel who we are watching. What we have read of him, and there is such a lot of good criticism still to be found, does not tie in with any of this film. Bunuel during the filming in Paris said of this film: "No more cinema for me-not in Spain. Not in France. Nowhere. Belle de Jour is my last film."

Un- or fortunately, it seems this is not so. For out of a few months reclusing, it has been publicly made known that he has finished another script with Jean-Claude Cassiere (who did Belle) for his next film, provisionally titled "La Voie Lactee" ("The Milky Way").

Maybe one day we will wait for the old man to do what he had planned several years ago-a film of Dalton Trumbo's moving novel Johnny Got His Gun. Two people I know would give both their arms and legs to see this come true.

The forces of circumstance

by Nevil Gibson

I don't know how many were deterred by the title Shakespeare Wallah, but let it be said that this is no Eng. Lit. verbosity. "Wallah" is Hindi for "pedlar", and refers to a troupe of English and Indian actors who travel around India performing excerpts from Shakespeare. First released in 1965, it has been brought to New Zealand by 20th Century-Fox. and good on them for letting us see one of the most truly moving and beautiful films for some time.

The Shakespearean wallahs, the Buckinghams, play before dwindling and apathetic audiences. The twilight of Empire also means the eclipse of the English literary heritage and its most celebrated exponent. The underlying theme concerns the reality of the situation viewed sympathetically with nostalgia and sadness. The tone is perhaps summed up at the beginning when an impoverished Indian prince remarks in a droll monologue at dinner that "Sooner or later we have to come to terms with reality". As the film concerns people of the theatre, that reality takes some coming to terms with.

The theatre is its own world, a world where the only privacy' is the dressingroom. It is a "sacred" world which must not pass merely because it appears that the world outside ignores it. But decay brings with it a reality for each character. The Buckinghams realise that movies have replaced the theatre as the chief source of edification and enjoyment. and although the troupe must disband, the two of them must continue to do Snakespeare-that only do they know. Their daughter Lizzie must go to England, possibly to continue her Shakespearean career at Stratford with the Greats. She knows that her lover, Sanju, cannot sacrifice himself to the demands of a life with someone born in the theatre. The oldest member of the troupe, Bobby (Jim Tytler) laments the passing of the old days when the wine racks were well-stocked and the ballroom full of music and dancing.

Each finds the basis of their lives in decay, but none can escape it. We see real people on the screen, not just "actors" in the conventional sense, yet they are actors in life. This may sound confusing, but confusion is dispelled once we know that, if not already guessed, the extremely high quality of the acting could only be done by a group of intimate people. The Buckinghams are played by Geoffrey Kendal and his wife Laura Liddell, Their younger daughter, Felicity, is the delightful Lizzie Buckingham, Shashi Kapoor, the handsome young Indian matinee idol (seen recently in his first non-Indian film A Matter of Innocence), is the suave playboy Sanju (Shashi, incidentally, is married to the Kendals' elder (laughter, Jennifer, who plays the proprietress of the boardinghouse, Gleneagles, where most of the action is set).

The glamorous Indian actress Mandjula is perfectly portrayed bv Madhur Jaffrey (and I hope we see more or her, too). All the actors are admirably suited to character, re-inforcing the high regard I have for the acting in the few films by Satyajit Ray that have been seen here, All the characters, no matter how idiotic, embarrassed or stupid they may feel or look, are presented sympatheti-cally, even affectionately. We believe in them, feel with them, and become emotionally involved with them.

The structure of the film is surprisingly complex, and the sorting out of time sequence was made clear only on a second viewing. It appears that incident follows incident, but in actuality tne film is built around one Single day with many cuts back and forward in time Lizzie's first meeting with Sanju chances to a deep involvement which we do not at first fully comprehend.

Once Mandjula sees the threat to her life of glamour from the friendship between Sanju and Lizzie we are abruptly plunged into the full passion of their love But Sanju can never fully throw over his easy, exulted position-he sits in the director's chair during the filming of one of Mandjula's corny pieces of nonsense later expressing his ambition to make a film about the history of rhythms. The contrast between the rather sordidin the material not the moral sense-setting of the theatre and the glitter and narcissim of the film world, there is a chasm that not even love can bridge. In Hollywood schmaltz this would be so. The truth is much different. In the cinema the theatre is generally seen as depraved and decadent; this film is in love with the theatre, an only too rare thing.

We cannot, of course, forget James Ivory's contribution as director. His control and mise en scene is superb, capturing the essence of each individual scene (without tedious overshooting) despite the film's gradualismalleged "slowness" doesn't come into it: No films are "slow", it's just that bad films say very little and take a long time saying it. I haven't seen Jean Renoir's Indian film, The River-the first good film made in India by a European-but I imagine that Ivory has continued in that great director's tradition. Characterisation, lyricism and charm also recall Renoir It was Renoir, too, who inspired Satyajit Ray to make his first film, the masterpiece Pather Panchali.

Ivory wrote Shakespeare Wallah in collaboration with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, an American writer married to an Indian. This script, with Ray's delightful music and Subrata Mitra's clear, clean black-and-white photography (Mitra is Ray's cameraman) indicates all too clearly that India has developed a unique kind of cinema which stands with the world's best. I wonder if this is only the tip of an iceberg and whether there are other masterpieces awaiting discovery.

It would only he splitting hairs to attempt to pick out points to criticise. I usually fail to see the reason for this. If a film's minor weaknesses upset for a little while, doubts are swept awav in a few minutes. I enjoyed what I remember of Ivory's first film. The Householder, shown here few and I look forward to seeing it again and also to his film, The Guru. Written by Ivory and Mrs Jhabvala it stars Rita Tushingham and Michael York (they were together in Smashing Time). Ismail Merchant is again producer his first production directly for 20th Century-Fox. We should see it soon.