Cinema: Alive and Well in Europe

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Three good reasons to consider reading subtitles again

As laughs, tears and special effects carried Hollywood to one of its most popular years in the U.S. and abroad, European film makers were finding it harder to attract attention, especially in the American market. The "art houses" of the 1960s, where a United Nations of cinema once reigned, now play host to mainstream movies from the suburbs of Los Angeles. Critics' groups, which had regularly knighted Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, now bestow their awards on Steven Spielberg and Sydney Pollack. With many American critics, moviemakers and moviegoers on a slumming spree, the intellectual cachet of European films has been broken. But there is still cinematic ingenuity to be found outside the U.S., and sometimes even in U.S. movie theaters. Three encouraging examples:

TIME STANDS STILL

1963. High school. Don't Be Cruel and Tutti Frutti. Philip Morris cigarettes. Fast times and slow dancing. Rebels without cause. Budapest. (Huh?) It would seem that what Jean-Luc Godard called the Coca-Colonization of Europe made an early conquest of Eastern Europe too, worming not just into jeans but into dreams. The ecstasy of fear flashes on a teen-ager's face as he dares to sass a sadistic teacher, and one can trace the punk-heroic contours of James Dean. Seven years after the Soviet-crushed revolution, Hungarian youths want only to escape, if not to America then into its music and attitudes. But escape is an adolescent fantasy; maturity comes to these engaging kids when they realize they are stuck where they are, glued to themselves and their society.

Director Peter Gothar displays the teasing visual intelligence of the very brightest film-school graduate. He is forever calling attention to his devices, such as putting his camera on roller skates, pixilating the images, and then, at the last moment, flummoxing the viewer's expectations with an ingenious twist. Like just about every Hungarian movie that reaches the U.S., Time Stands Still is a handsome piece of work, with suffused lighting and a gray, ominous mist that hangs over the characters like a nuclear cloud. But there is verve sparking all of Gothar's calculation, and his young actors (notably Sandor Soth and Maria Ronyecz) prove as adept at miming edgy idealism as any gang outside Hollywood High. A few weeks ago, Time Stands Still was deemed best foreign-language film of 1982 by the New York Film Critics Circle. It is certainly one of the sleekest and easiest to enjoy.

—By Richard Corliss

THE STATIONMASTER'S WIFE