Cinema: Festival Days in New York

• Share

The New York Film Festival, held every year at Lincoln Center, continues to be the most prestigious and, not incidentally, the best of the half a dozen or so U.S. film festivals. In its eleventh year, the festival has settled into a definite personality: it is everyone's slightly eccentric, goodhearted aunt, the one who grooms herself in the arts and stages soirees that are unavoidable, a little silly but almost always pleasant.

As usual, this year's screenings—which concluded last week after a marathon 16 days—introduced a worthy film or two, surveyed what is currently interesting or chic on the Continent, and provided a temporary home for the outcasts. Best received were Truffaut's Day for Night (TIME, Oct. 15) and an American movie, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. The home team, indeed, was well represented this year by Mean Streets, Terrence Malick's Badlands (both to be reviewed separately when they are generally released) and James Frawley's Kid Blue, a funny, anarchic western released unsuccessfully last spring (TIME, May 14). Some notes on the other selections:

A DOLL'S HOUSE. Joseph Losey's version of the Ibsen classic is frosty and severe, embellished with several clumsy contemporary asides about the injustices heaped on women. It has the vigor and passion of commitment, however, and the cast is superb. Trevor Howard's Dr. Rank is gruffly tender; Delphine Seyrig's Kristine, a woman of tentative but dependable dignity; and Edward Fox's Krogstad, a figure of understandable desperation. David Warner makes Torvald into a complex, insidious but always human figure. It is a performance of the foremost skill and intelligence, and includes a quick moment—when, with meticulous condescension, he mimics Nora sewing—that is worth a gross of pamphlets and essays on sexism.

Jane Fonda represents the film's firmest break with tradition: a strong, defiantly contemporary Nora. Hers is not a thoroughly shaded interpretation —it is a little too direct and aggressive 73151;but it is a great deal more interesting and closer to the mark than Claire Bloom's airy Nora, a stage performance recently translated to film (TIME, June 18). One thing Fonda manages well is the delicate transition behind the closed bedroom door. As in the play, we do not see Nora change, but when Fonda comes out again to confront Torvald and prepare to leave, the viewer feels he can calibrate the painful inches by which the decision has been reached. Her fire and intelligence cause all the melodrama in the moment to fall aside and reveal a hard truth.

JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL is Director Claude Chabrol's cunningly engineered fable about a man (Michel Bouquet) who strangles his mistress and is slowly enveloped by guilt. He blurts out a confession to his wife, who understands; he tells his best friend, who is similarly sympathetic. The fact that his friend was also his mistress's husband only adds a little piquancy to the situation. Awash in forgiveness, the hapless killer has only one logical object for his mounting horror and self-loathing. His home, all glass and chrome and odd, abrupt angles, makes a suitably antiseptic moral landscape for the film, which is implacably smooth and elegant in the telling. Among Chabrol's finest work.