GOING TO THE MOVIES
Jonathan Baumbach
THE 14TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
New films by Fram;ois Truffaut
(Small Change)
and Eric Rohmer
(The Marquise 010 .
.. )
circumscribe the present Festival at Lincoln Center
and set the tone.
It
is a solid Festival, more respectable than in its best years,
with few surprises and no large disappointments. Among the highlights are
the Truffaut and the Rohmer, the retrospective showings of Renoir's
Nana
(1926) and Visconti's
Obssessione
(1942), and new films by Rivette, Kuro–
sawa, Fassbinder, Borowczyk and Marcel Ophuls. The West Germans seem
to
me
over-represented and the Americans, apart from the short subjects
(and how banal most of those are), given meager occasion . The following
are some of my notes on particular films.
Small Change,
Fran~ois
Truffaut
Truffaut's new film is about the pains and wonders of childhood-his
own as invested in a collection of anecdotes about others-and is deceptively
artful in achieving seemingly artless effects.
Small Change
is not as minor
or as casually sentimental a film as it is willing to seem. The anecdotes are
given connection by having the action centered for the most part in two
classes in a provincial boys' school, a school which is to become coeduca–
tional (a loss of its innocence) the following year. The sweetness of the direc–
tor's personality informs the various rites of passage we witness, softening
some
of the blows (a matter of calculation perhaps) without cheapening the
vision. At one point an infant falls out of a four-story window and lands
miraculously unharmed. My sense is that the audience is treated similarly.
Small Change
is not so much about children as it is a revisit to childhood,
showing us the lives of children as
if
the children were their own camera.
The form of Truffaut's film, as opposed
to
the intrinsic interest of its various
narratives, is its triumph . The movie ends with Patrick, one of its two twelve–
year-old protagonists, getting a first kiss at summer camp, and the rite of
passage is completed . "Children are in a state of grace," says the director's
stand-in, in explanation of the infant surviving his seemingly perilous fall,
