Circle of Two What Poverty Does to Most People
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REVIEWS was closer to Steinbeck than to Dostoev we associate with Wamer Bros, shop Claude Foumier's ski- there's something broad-shouldered girls of the same period. And yet Dey Jules Dassin's and strongbacked about her work, and glun, with her wade-set eyes and blunt Bonheur d'occasion gets that on film features, reveals in the most unobtrusive Bonheur along with her deep understanding of ways just how vulnerable and worn- Circle of Two what poverty does to most people. In down Florentine is as she schemes her her books it doesn't usually make them way upward into respectability by con d'occasion heroic or mad or even criminal, it just ning a man she doesn't love into marry reduces them to so much less than they ing her. For an experienced film actress, might have been under different and such a carefully shaded (and frequently It's the easiest thing in the world to slightly better circumstances, forcing funny) Florentine would be a major when Circle of Two was finally shown, dismiss Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin them to compromise in ways most of us accomplishment; as Deyglun's first after several false starts, on CBCs winter Flute) as just another six-handkerchief never have to. screen role, Florentine is nothing less series of Canadian films, it brought to an weeper. God knows misery and tears Veteran Quebec director Claude Four than a triumph. end the rather sorry history of the Film Consortium of Canada. The hopes abound in this two-hour French-lan nier gets the right look for the book - St Marilyn Lightstone, who plays Floren engendered six years ago after the guage adaptation of the late Gabrielle Henri's dirty snow and peeling paint tine's mother with decidedly mixed and unexpected success of Outrageous, that Roy's novel of the same title in which and a sky choked with blue-black smoke bathetic results, has been cackling to Bill Marshall and Henk Van Der Kolk young Florentine Lacasse, daughter of from coal-buming furnaces and the the press about the movie's reception at would be the bright lights of the English- Montreal's working-class St. Henri dis trains that sever St. Henri from the very the Moscow Film Festival earlier this language film boom, have been proven trict, learns that when you're poor life feet of Westmount. Not that reproducing summer. The Soviets thought Bonheur to be yet another of the many mirages isn't about what you want, it's about the quartier could have been that hard- d'occasion was portraying present-day that came and went in those years. In what you can get. St. Henri now looks much as it must Canada. "I think it appealed to the fact. Circle of Two stands as a prime have done in 1945, still shabby and cut Russians," Lightstone said, "because Father shiftless, mother perpetually example of what went wrong. aproned and pregnant, little brother off, although gentrification is blooming they like to see North Americans in dying of TB (and in the bountiful arras of at the edges of its tree-lined parks now pain." She went on to say that an intro The first, and perhaps the most basic les Anglais, no less) - hell, the sacred the Metro goes there. duction was added to the film to explain mistake the producers made was to heart polychrome is practically bleeding A lot of trains run through Bonheur to Moscow audiences that it does not attempt to adapt Marie-Terese Baird's onto the antimacassars as the neighboi^ d'occasion - their proximity signals depict current conditions. Maybe thafs novel "A Lesson of Love" at all. This was hood wolf seduces our Florentine on poverty as much as starchy food and true, maybe families of ten no longer a book about which reviewers used the parlor couch, leaving her pregnant cold-water flats. Rumbling to the syn live in slum conditions in St. Henri. For words like "wooden," "unbelievable," and then leaving her, period. copated saxophone of the movie's theme, that maybe you have to travel farther and "preposterous" with considerable I was going to say that the movie's they chug mournfully along through the east to, say, the Centre-Sud district, frequency, and it never achieved a best greatest virtues are really negative ones darkening air. Unfortunately the movie where the average yearly income for a seller status tbat could offset these - ifs not dishonest, it's not insincere - takes its shape as well as its mood from family of four is $7000 and where life negative comments. but when you come right down to it, these trains : it lumbers along car after expectancy is ten years less than on the Then there was Tom Hedley's script. Bonheur d'occasion's real strength lies car filled with so much misery and pain, western end of the Island of Montreal. He did a creditable enough job translat in its fidelity to its source. that instead of registering the enormity In another 40 years or so, maybe someone ing the story from the provincial town of You don't go to this picture expecting of it all, we end up counting the cars and will make a movie about that. Windsor in England (best known as the a great movie; Bonheur d'occasion isn't longing for the caboose. The movie has a site of a major royal castle) to Toronto, a great novel, despite unrelenting at muffled clacking regularity about it. WillAitken • and for once that city played itself. But tempts by high-school lit teachers Nothing builds, every scene seems to Hedley is something of an incurable throughout the nation to elevate it to strike exactly the same note of futility. romantic in genres where sentimentality BONHEUR D'OCCASION d. Claude proves deadly - as the scripts for the classic status. The book must have This may be true to the monotony of Fournier exec. p. Marie-JDS6 Raymond and Robert seemed old-fashioned even when it first poverty itself, but surely what we need Verrall p. Marie-Jos6 Raymond sc Claude Foamier quirky Mister Patman and the frankly appeared in 1945, since it barkened here is a film about the poor and not a and Marie-Jos6 Raymond add. writing B.A. Came silly Flashdance bear witness. poor film. ron based on the novel by Gabrielle Roy assoc back to the style and values of the social p. Dorothy Courtois Lecourand Paterson Ferns ed. And Circle of Two's plot offered more realists of the previous decade, with its What saves Bonheur d'occasion from Vves Langlois p. man. Sylvte de Grandpr^ 1st a. d. than a few sinkholes for Hedley and dogged, uninspired prose and over- leaving us absolutely numb is the central Mireille Goulet sc sup. Monique Champagne director Jules Oassin to fall into. It is the emphatic stoicism. mus. Francis Ekimpierre theme song performed story of a romance bet^veen Sarah Norton, performance of Mireille Deyglun as by Diane Tell lyrft» Nancy Ward and Mouffe p. The movie plods along so reverently young Florentine. Her Florentine is no des. Charles Dunlop sd. rec Jacques Drouin cost, a 16-year-old private-school student, and in Roy's wake you can practically feel beauty, but you sense that with more des. Nicole Pelletier make-up Marie-Ang^le Protat Ashley St Clair, a sixtyish artist who has the pages turning (the whole thing has money she could be. Her clothes are hair Gadtan Noiseux stills Attila Dory color 35mm been suffering ft-om a creative block for running time 121 minutes dist Cm6 360 Lp^ ten years. Sarah first meets him in a been boiled down from a much longer ugly and cheaply fashionable, her hair Marilyn Li^tstone, Mireille Deyglun, Michel Forget, version destined for television), and yet too sculpted and her lips too red, even Pierre Chagnon, Mariin Neufaldj Charlotte Laurier, theatre where she has snuck in to see a that reverence carries us along too. Roy for the war years, giving her the hardness Linda Sorgini. pom film, an^ then again in a Yorkville restaurant after she has a fight with her boyfriend. For some reason, Ashley is fascinated by this superficially preco cious girl, and she agrees to sit for him. Sarah, meanwhile, works overtime trying seduce the reticent painter. Paul, the erstwhile boyfriend, gets into a fight with Sarah, who fractures Us skull. Sarah's parents, who consider Ashley just a dirty old man, lock Sarah in her room, where she goes into a deep depression. Eventually Ashley and Sarah reunite, but are forced to admit the end of their platonic relationship. Under Dassin's heavyhanded direc tion, this turns out to be as dismal as it sounds. Tatum O'Neal should have known after International Velvet that she had no talent for drama. The perky insouciance that won her the Academy Award at the age of nine for Paper Moon has totally vanished, leaving the same pretty blandness that characterizes her father's dramatic roles. O'Neal is never able to take Sarah any higher, than tem- permental brattishness. Richard Burton, who plays Ashley, fares only marginally better. That rich intonation, as it has in many flhns before, can cover a multitude of defects, including the ravages of several decade* of hard living and even harder drinking. omola SCRIPT TO ^^0^ ^^yv CANADAS LARGEST MOTION PICTURE • PRODUCTION CENTRE 1500 PAPINEAU STREET, MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA H2K4L9 (514)527-8671 TELEX 05 561 722 ii^.W?"'..! '••^m^k w^^^^ ^"'"" '.,-ft.' ' - 'ifltiai,.