Cinema: Festivals

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In theory, the New York Film Festival is a confluence of fresh works by prodigies; in practice, it has been a babel of indifferent talents redeemed only occasionally by a feature of originality. The festival officers are at once innocent and culpable. Many Eastern European pictures were unavailable; American companies prefer to release their films without any festival foreplay. But no such restrictions forced the selection of solemn bores and hedged experiments that mark the 1970 festival. Presented with inconsistent aesthetic standards, promoted with hyperthyroid jargon ("vertiginous spatial ambiguity . . . total meta-theatricality"), the New York Film Festival continues an uneven tradition now running into its eighth year. Some representative features:

The Wild Child. In the forest of Aveyron in 1801, a savage animal was captured. It was a boy of about twelve, origins unknown, with vulpine instincts and capacities. This Mowgli-like creature became renowned in his own time; a hundred years later, he was an object of fascination for Educator Maria Montessori. Now the cycle begins anew with this work by Francois Truffaut. At first the mud-caked curiosity (Jean-Pierre Cargol) is treated as a zoo animal, visited by Parisians who applaud his pathetic growls and tantrums. Mercifully —or so it seems—the child is taken in tow by Dr. Itard (played by Truffaut himself). The primitive behaviorist names his charge Victor and slowly teaches him the habits and manners of civilization. But there is a ceiling of comprehension above Victor's head. Once he bumps it, all is lost. The embodiment of Rousseau's noble savage cannot progress to "normality"; yet he has lost the ability to survive in the wilderness. Victor is vanquished, condemned by science to be chained in perpetual twilight.

Actor Truffaut, decked in frock coat and silk hat, is a splendid blend of pomposity and curiosity. But Director Truffaut is lethargic and clinical. The Wild Child is never touched by his characteristic warmth; its ironies are all predictable, save the final one: this is Truffaut's crudest work, as if it were the first film in the canon and not the latest.

Kes suffers from the somewhat shopworn metaphor that forms its core. Billy (David Bradley) is a melancholy loner whose older brother bullies him and whose mother plays aunt to a succession of one-night uncles. Wandering in the woodlands near his Yorkshire village one morning, he spots a kestrel's nest and becomes intrigued with the bird's grace, its power and freedom. He steals a book on falconry, steals one of the kestrel's offspring and proceeds, with quiet dedication, to train the bird, which he calls Kes. The obvious contrast between earthborn Billy and skyborne Kes is stressed to the breaking point and beyond. The entire film harks back to the angry young man movies of the early '60s, but Director Ken Loach still conjures up some forceful moments. The casual sadism of schoolmasters, the brutality of one child to another are rendered with astounding empathy. One scene, funny and frightening by turns, finds Billy and some peers being dressed down by the headmaster while they try to stop laughing at his endless platitudes and struggle to hold in the tears after they have been punished. The sequence is memorable enough to make one wish that all of Kes had been as good.