JONATHAN BAUMBACH
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Elaine May's
Mikey and Nicky,
Carlos Saura's
Cousin Angelica,
Fassbinder's
Effie Brest,
Shindo's horror classic
Onibaba,
Wajda's
The
Promised Land,
Gunnel Lindblom's
Summer Paradise;
Pasolini's
Salo,
Herzog's
Heart of Glass
and Borwxzyk's
The Beast.
In addition,
as a last-minute entry, there was a world premier of a film made in
Seattle, called
Gas City,
which the program notes promise "will
irretrievably put Seattle on the filmmaking map." Typically, provin–
cial good will overstates itself.
Madame Rosa,
the festival's most public gesture, is a tasteful, well–
performed bit of what Truffaut called "The Tradition of Quality," a
skillful mix of understated sentimentality and "important" social
theme. This heart-of-gold French film is neither better nor worse than
its long-running Hollywood counterparts,
Julia, Coming Home, The
Turning Point,
and
An Unmarried Woman,
the real hits of the Seattle
film scene.
The Turning Point,
in particular, playing in the University
district, had lines around the block for eight months. Audiences in
Seattle, as elsewhere, like their soap operas disguised with the patina of
culture, and we have entered a period, or have been in it for several
years, in which sentimentality passes for genuine feeling.
Madame
Rosa
is
The Defiant Ones
of its day, a soulful Arab boy and a dying
Jewish woman emotionally chained together while the vaudeville of
the world goes on outside. Attractions like
Madame Rosa,
which bring
in crowds, ostensibly make possible the showing of difficult and
original films that lack a ready-to-wear audience.
One of these more original films is Werner Herzog's
Heart of
Glass,
which I saw for the first time at the Lincoln Center Festival last
fall. The messianic cynicism that informs Herzog's cinema is probably
no more profound than the emotional uplift-love makes it all right in
an otherwise thankless world-of
Madame Rosa.
The difference is that
Heart of Glass
is uniquely envisioned, is a serious work of art. Herzog
has a cult following in Seattle, particularly among university students.
Every seat in the capacious Moore was filled for the Festival showing of
Heart of Glass,
a buzz of expectation in the audience. The young
audience,
to
my dismay, talked back
to
the picture, made oohs and ahhs
of admiration and surprise. Their Herzog is not mine, but it neverthe–
less pleased me to see a filmmaker as uncompromising as Werner
Herzog treated with the kind of respect the young usually reserve for
the meretricious. My favorite Herzog continues to be
Every Man for
Himself and God against A ll,
now being called
The Mystery of Kaspar
Hausar.
Something in the sensibility of
Heart of Glass,
the pleasure it
takes in its own cynicism, alternately repels and fascinates me.
I was pleased to see Elaine May's determinedly uncharming
Mikey
