Cinema: Festival Attraction, Side-Show Action

Most film festivals give prizes—which is why they seem to resemble the kind of raucous television M.C. who calls more attention to himself than to those he introduces. Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival, which opened last week, has always been more seemly than its European counterparts, because it gives no awards; thus there are never any egos jockeying backstage for the coveted Silver Palm or Golden Frog.

This year that policy seems wiser than ever. In the past, Lincoln Center featured new films by the creative experimenters of the art-house circuit—Bufiuel, Resnais, Kurosawa, Losey. The 1967 scene offers an old and a new Godard (Les Carabiniers, Made in U.S.A.) and a sluggish Rossellini (The Rise of Louis XIV), but otherwise gives itself over to cinematic unknowns. Unfortunately, few entries rise above mediocrity.

Among the strongest:

Young Topless is a painstakingly accurate re-creation of life in a military school of imperial Austria. Torless (Matthieu Carriere) is a sensitive boy—the despair of his father and the overweening hope of his mother—who begins his scholastic career at a noted academy. Hardly has he buttoned up his tunic when he begins to sense that military intelligence is a contradiction in terms. His professors are interested in order, not in knowledge; most of his fellow students are toadies and bullies who pervert the authority over them by victimizing those under them. In Tor-less' class, the chief victim is Basini (Marian Seidowsky), a dim-witted boy who steals some money and then finds himself blackmailed into blind obedience by his discoverers. Nightly, in an attic over the dormitory, the two young extortionists sadistically beat Basini, who submits to every indignity with the passivity of a pack horse.

Torless never engages in the brutality, but he becomes a pliant onlooker—revolted by sadism, yet unwilling to murmur a word to the authorities. Even tually, the boys' nocturnal brutality cannot be contained in an attic; during one hysterical afternoon, the entire student body participates in an orgy of cruelty and hangs Basini by the heels.

At times, Director Volker Schlondorff tries all too obviously to point up parallels between the violence of the academy and life in Hitler's Germany —as when Torless rather ponderously testifies at a school-board inquiry into Basini's death that "there is no boundary between a good world and an evil world: they run together and very normal people can spread terror." Otherwise, Young Torless, adapted from the novel by Robert Musil, is a perfect—and perfectly chilling—evocation of the underside of a vanished era.

Elvira Madigan is an elegiac pastorale based on the true story of a Swedish cavalry officer (Thommy Berggren) who deserted his wife, children and career for a hopeless liaison with a circus tightrope walker (Pia Deger-mark). Abandoning their past, ignoring their inevitably tragic future, the two flee to Denmark to spend one delirious summer of happiness. Like stars that burn most brilliantly just before they are extinguished, the couple are renewed by simple pleasures—their bodies, the heady summer air, the wide riverbanks and the small, disciplined forests.