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

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Sales Vancouver: Distributors of Tiffen, Rosco, Lowe! and Osram 43 West, 6th Avenue. V5Y 1 K2 (604) 873-3901 REVIEWS of immigration officer Noel Manufort (Dermot Hennelly) for whom the war is Jack Darcus' a Heaven-sent opportunity to put the principles ofliberalism into practice : to bend the immigration rules, and to offer Desertere shelter to deserving war-resisters. One such young hero is Peter (Jon Bryden), who somewhat hesitanth' accepts Manuforf s invitation home. But Manufort's home is also that of his War, to judge by its monuments and wife, Val (Barbara March), who if she celebrations, is something to be remem­ does not share her husband's zeal for bered. Not so the Vietnam war. Forgotten the cause, does on the other hand desire too is that the war in Vietnam was in an the friendship' of the young men her important sense also Canada's war, that husband brings home, as she intimates some Canadians fought in it, that Cana­ to Peter when Manufort is called away da's high-tech industries profitted on an emergency. immensely from it. Now Vancouver film­ When Noel returns he has brought maker Jack Darcus has made a film that back with him yet another 'deserter', attempts to remember. still in his sergeant's uniform : it is Ulys­ Deserters, Darcus' fourth feature film ses Hawley searching for his runaway (after Great Coups of History, 1970; men. And so the scene is set for the Proxyhawks, 1972; The Wolfpen Prin­ ensuing confrontation between the Sol­ ciple, 1974) was one of the gems among dier, the Youth, the Liberal, and the an otherwise meagre offering of Cana­ Woman. dian films at Montreal's 7th World Film What transpires between the walls of Festival. With all the clarity of a suddenly the Manufort home is a domestic version recollected nightmare. Deserters pro­ of guerrilla war in the sense that, as in pels one back, for a relentless 110 minu­ Vietnam, nothing is what it seems. tes, to "American 1969" with its trains Peter is a deserter only because his and railway stations full of soldiery, the college grades were bad and he got his travelling salesmen of a nation at war. girl-friend pregnant. Noel's liberalism is Alongside such a train, tw^o young only this year's fashion in a desperate grunts, duffel bags packed and Vietnam- search for personal meaning : the year bound after boot camp, are fleeing from before it was Zen and pottery. Val's a shadow. Aboard the train the shadow marital discontent is only sexual. Only materializes into their drill instructor, Hawle/s sham desertion turns out to be Sgt. Ulysses Hawley, United States Army, genuine after all. marvelously portrayed by Alan Scarfe. In a Nietzschean transvaluation of Gum-chewing, boorish, with a slight values, Peter decides to go home and southern accent, Hawley, a three-tour fight for his country; Noel's and Val's Vietnam veteran, is headed for a five- marriage irreparably collapses; and Although Burton is known to think little Cinema Canada, No. 60), was almost day drunk between shifts of new draf­ Hawley bitterly accepts the defeat of his of his film roles in general, he gives this totally removed in favor of a standardized tees. During the train-ride he terrifies militaristic ideals. But if the others can his best effort, hampered admittedly by romantic background music. Thus, per­ the two grunts with macabre Vietnam and will survive at the price of some the myriad defects in the film's execution. haps the most exciting and interesting jokes, and sasses a staff captain who self-understanding, Peter, one realizes The same cannot be said of the minor aspect of the film vanished, and in the can't help overhear Hawle^s criticism at the film's end, will die, sacrificed to characters - Michael Wincott as the last analysis it could be seen that Circle of the conduct of the war. the remains of moribund national ideals. boorish boyfriend, Robin Gammell and of Two failed for reasons that were Disembarking at an unspecified sta­ But Deserters is also about our war Patricia Hamilton as Sarah's dense obvious from the outset. It was dull, tion, Hawley attempts to coerce the two within, the conflict between Canadian parents, Nuala Fitzgerald as Ashley's old dull, dull. to go drinking with him. They reply they and American identities. If the Ameri­ name - with the exception of Kate Reid first have to say goodbye to their waiting cans do have national ideals to fall back as Sarah's doctor, whose brief appear­ J. Paul Costabile • parents outsitie. The captain suddenly upon (Peter) or to rebel against (Hawley), ance cuts through the intellectual mire appears, telling Hawley his two men Canada - which at one point Hawley of the script with typical briskness. CIRCLE OF TWO d. Jules Dassin a.d. have just gotten into a car, and headed calls "This tin-pot country that can't Timothy Rowse. Frank Simpson, Sarah Miller Hay- straight for Canada which is just up the Perhaps, however, the greatest folly ward, Jerome McCann CFDC trainee Rex Brom- even get in on the action" - has only a in Circle of Two lies in the pretentious­ field sc. Thomas Hedley. from the novel "A Lesson road. "But they're my best men," Hawley weak liberalisnr as the semblance of a ness of Jules Dassin's direction. This of Love" by Marie-Terese Baird d.o.p. Laszlo George says, flabbergast. "If those are your best national ideal, one that threatens to script needed a light touch if it was to C.S.C. cam. op. Harold Ortenburger 2nd unit men, this countiys in trouble," the cap­ collapse under the slightest pressure, photo^ Jean Badel edit David Nicholson creative work at all. Instead, Dassin, perhaps cons. Fima Noveck sd. rec. Owen Langevin, Jim tain answers. exposing the cavernous nihiUsm beyond. embittered by years of exile from North Franck sd. asst Randy Milligan sd. ed. Wayne Just up the road, Canada is the office And yet even this feeble facade offers America, the failure of his later projects, Griffon, Dennis Drummond p. man. Danny Rossner most notably A Dream Of Passion, to unit man. D. Robert McCart loc man. Gail Singer, Fran Soloman p. des. Claude Bonniere, Francois De gain any positive recognition, and a Lucy p. des. Anne Pepper, Barbara Tranter asst sense of having been passed by, attempts , art d. Joyce Liggett, Don McQueen paintings, to moralize. Thus Ashley speaks gravely art adviser Harold Barling Town asst art advisor of the artistic vision, and is seen to be Brian Nowell easels VV.H. Town scenic artist James Williams sitetcli artist Phillip Moody betrayed by a gallery owner he once graplilcs David Johnston, Bruno Cywinski cost considered a friend. But Dassin omits to des. Theoni V. Aldredge, Donna Thomas ward. show any real indication of Ashley's Brian Sands, Muriel Sampson. Sarah Miller Hayward talent, in spite of contributions of the ward, co-ord. Gayle McLeod malceup Barbara Palmer, Ron Berkeley (for Richard Burton) music distinguished Canadian artist Harold Paul Hofferi, Antonio Vivaldi, J.S. Bach stunt co­ Town, whose work is used for the paint­ ord. Dwayne McLean stand-ins Rosl\'n Foreyth, ings. George Cunningham p. asst Robert Imeson, Andrew Adach, Ray Harris pub. Stephenson, Ramsay, A mention of Fima Noveck's contri­ CDonnell p.c. Circle of Two Productions (Film bution to Circle of Two is in order. In Consortium of Canada, in association with Jerume Simon and Milton Zysman Productions! p. Henk 1981, he was brought in, following the Van Der Kolk exec. p. William Marshall assoc. p. Rim's negative response in Europe, to Bob Rodgers colour35mm re-edit the picture. His main intent, he runningtimelOSmin, Lp. Tatum O'Neal, later said, was to rid the film of its Richard Burton. Nuala Fitzgerald, Robin Gammell, staginess. Thus much extraneous Patricia Hamilton, Kale Reid, Donann Cavin, Norma material about Sarah and her school life Dell'Agnese, Michael Wincolt, George Bourne Sr., Leo Leyden. Elan Ross Gibson. Gordon Jocelyn, Bob appears to have been excised, though at Aarons, Pat Patterson, Brendan McKane. A. Frank the cost of making the already thin Ruffo. Morison Bock, Bibi Caspary. Les Carlson, character thinner still. In one area Linda Anionnacci, Eileen Kim, Judy Noble. Annette Noveck did considerable damage. Paul Stevens, Wendy Tumman, Yanka Van Der Kolk, Elias Zarou. Larn- Ewashen, Lee Majors, Ryan O'Neal Hofferf s original score, which included (in original version only!, Maggie Morris. Doug performances by the Paul Brodie Quartet, Smith. Pamela Hyatt. Jimmy Leone, Grace Stephens, Moe Koffman, Erica Goodman and the Daisy White. Ann Butler, Bill Yack, The Bishop • Guerrilla warlare in a Canadian living-room: Alan Scarte, left and Jofin Bryden in Dasertara Bishop Strachan School Choir (see Strachan School Choir,

October 1983 - Cinema Canada/29