FILM REVIEWS 39 THE FRENCH GAME ly, with its various collisions and falls, com­ Director: Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. Script: Jacques Doniol- bine energy and flavor in a way that certifies Valcroze. Photography: Christian Matras. Music: Michel the later, lyrical moments as naturally grown Legrand. With Françoise Brion and Jean-Louis Trintignant. into. The spare, remarkably beautiful shots Atlantic. which signal the eventual consummation are New York’s first Doniol-Valcroze, actually L e especially exemplary, with their wordless ten- coeur battant (196 0), was especially useful derness; in them, nothing is taken for more coming in the wake of the Festival: its calm, than it is, but that is so well conveyed that fresh charm quite served to dispel the stiff almost every previous sexual encounter parade of art-films we had begun to assume remembered in films seems suddenly false. were speaking for ail of contemporary cinéma. Two attractive people, Françoise Brion and It isn’t much to look at in a conventional Jean-Louis Trintignant, play with extraordi- sense, visually revealing tact* and understand- nary ease; aware, apparently, of appearing in ing much more than what we typically call an uncommonly humane film, they force noth­ imagination; still, the imagination is fully ing, taking time to breathe, to feel the situa­ engaged. The film is so exactly felt from first tion around them fully. Michel Legrand’s lush, to last, with only minor lapses (one or two mock-vulgar score, in its own way, is nearly as caméra tricks, some overlong seascapes), that felicitous. Better thanks than the slick title, it becomes a viable experience, which one the misspelled name in the lobby, and the wants to have again. Its moral tensions aren’t week’s run (with Crowther chortling god- abstract, but are followed to their inescapable speed) are due Doniol-Valcroze, a modest but results on the faces of the two leading actors; genuinely knowing and feeling film-maker the film is very like de Broca’s Five-Datj Lover with a taste—how rare this has grown—for in this. human relations; one hopes his other works On a Mediterranean island, a young artist will provide the same quiet elation. poses as the lover of a woman he himself —J a m e s S t o l l e r desires, so she can résumé last summer’s affair with a married man. Here, and how pleasur- able to find it, is a film whose characters take A TOUT PRENDRE for granted in each other, at the start, the (The W ay It Goes) Director: Claude Jutra. Producer: Robert kind of extremeness it takes others whole films Hershorn. With Claude Jutra, Johanne. Orion Films, 2152 to arrive at. Their respect for the seriousness Mackay Street, Montréal, P. Q., Canada. of each other’s positions is so graciously com­ Within the National Film Board of Canada, plété that the sobriety is transmuted into a increased emphasis is going to the French shared gaiety. Beginning with this situation, unit, evidently a reflection of the général re- the film weaves a busy fabric of games, small surgence of French feeling in Quebec pro­ and large, innocent and injurious, mutual and vince, where there is even a certain body of one-sided; until finally, in one of the last separatist opinion. The présent head of the shots, the artist walks past a company of play- NFB is a French Canadian, Guy Roberge. inS children, calmly observed in middle dis­ Members of the French unit corne and go tance, who suddenly begin jabbing and hit- between Canada and the Continent—Claude tjng each other, in the service of a symbolism Jutra made a short in France (La Bonne); that is unobtrusive, moving, and says nearly Michel Brault has worked with Rouch (on ali there is to say. Chronique d’un Eté ) and Ruspoli ( Regards Several perfectly wrought comic scenes, like sur la Folie), and has just completed an the lovers’ first attempt to share a bed chaste- épisode for an omnibus featurç on adole­ 40 FILM REVIEWS scence. The Montréal Film Festival is domi- There is much more to it than this, of nated by the French film-makers and shows course, but it is ail done with so much style, much contact with French developments. apparent ease, and felicity, that we realize we Leading contenders this year for the top have finally been given the American film we have been waiting for since France and Italy Canadian prize were A Tout Prendre and startled us with their innovations a few years Brault’s Pour la Suite du Monde. The interna­ ago. Jonas Mekas has argued repeatedly tional jury, chaired by Lindsay Anderson, (Film Culture, Village Voice) that the Ameri­ gave the prize to Jutra’s film. (Financed pri- can independent film-maker must hew his own vately and shot on 16mm, it was dubbed two path and find his own forms independently of days before the festival showing. ) his European peers. That sounds ail right but A Tout Prendre was made without any of the “films” of the New American Cinéma have the conventional Controls; it has the air of no form and do not seem to be following any freedom and spontaneity missing in any useful path. It is thus not surprising that (good) North-American narrative film since Mekas did not like A Tout Prendre very Shadows. And it is also fîlled with the inven- much, although it is the best American film of tiveness which a man risks when he has a many years and certainly the best of its génér­ grasp of the medium and is free to explore it. ation. Thus the film is extremely stylish (in the Why does such a thing happen in Canada, décorative sense), filled with directorial and and not the United States? The Film Board is éditorial flourishes, and it is revolutionary (in partly responsible, no doubt—where in this its structure and narrative form). We are country is such training available? But the aware of ail this from the time of the crédits. answer lies with the individual film-makers. We see a young man ( Claude—played by Jutra dedicates his film to McLaren and Jutra) performing his toilet, dressing, primp- Rouch, and he is close friends with Truffaut. ing in front of a mirror, affecting différent McLaren gives him the courage to jump guises, and finally shattering his mirror image around in his continuity. Rouch gives him the with a pistol shot. The remainder of the film courage to begin, not with a scénario, but an can be thought of as an embellishment of this event, a feeling, an experience—thus the film’s opening. We observe Claude as he meets and inspiration is in autobiography. But its justifi­ falls romantically in love with an amazing cation is in its style—and here there is the Negro girl, Johanne. They drift apart, but she influence of Truffant, not considered, self-con- announces that she is pregnant and that they sciously by Jutra, but évident to the viewer. are having trouble, perhaps, because he may Our producing film-makers often see the prefer “the young men.” He has a homosexual films of Truffaut, Godard, and Antonioni experiment, Johanne leaves him alone, and then (Rouch is unknown to them) but few know finally he abandons Johanne (after contem­ Johanne in A T o u t P r e n d r e . pla ting marriage), dissolving the affair by the simple expédient of sending her some money in the mail—to take care of her pregnancy. He has borrowed the money from a bank, and he feels so good that, to celebrate, he buys himself a new sweater. Stroking himself hap- pily he saunters off. Later Johanne meets a friend. “Any news of Claude?” He replies no. They walk on. The film ends. An image, a sériés of images, is shattered. FILM REVIEWS 41 what to do about what they have seen (any While walking in the park with Johanne he more than do the distributors or exhibitors). imagines a sinister stranger stalking them, try- Thus we have film-makers eut off from life ing to take Johanne, but in the struggle killing and art, hésitant to deal with life and, when them both. At another time Claude imagines they do, they are either in search of a style himself attacked and beaten up by two thugs, (Ben Maddow in Affair of the Skin and Denis and yet again, he imagines himself on a fire- Sanders in War Hunt), mixing styles (Joseph escape, fleeing from gangsters, and being shot Strick in The Balcony, Strick, Maddow and in the back in the act of shouting out to the Myers in The Savage Eye, Shirley Clarke in world. These incidents are inserted without The Connection), leaning stolidly on the past any technical préparation (dissolves, wipes, or (Frank Perry in David and Lisa, most of Kra- fades)—they are simply eut into the scene mer and Frankenheimer) or killing style alto- and proceed more or less with conventional gether (Jonas Mekas in Guns of the Trees). logic. Rather than existing at the same level of Adolfas Mekas at least has some fun with “realism” as the scenes on either side of them style, in Hallelujah the Hills, but no one ( as do the shifting scenes of tragedy and seems capable of finding a style which so ac- comedy in Shoot the Pianist), they function as curately fîts the subject as Jutra does here (I escapist fantasy, as illustrations of the emo- am excepting the documentary directors — tional fabric of a character, always martyring Leacock, Maysles, etc.).