GOING TO THE MOVIES
Jonathan Baumbach
THE SIXTEENTH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
The Sixteenth New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center
opened with Robert Altman's
A Wedding
and closed with Claude
Chabrol's
Violette,
both of which were released in commercial theaters
a day or two later. The event of the Festival seems to be guided, perhaps
circumstantially, by conflicting impulses: to present a range of the best
available film art and
to
show cinema that will attract a sizable
audience. It is a classic ambivalence and it tends
to
manifest itself in
uneasy compromises that satisfy neither purpose.
It
may be sympto–
matic that two of the freshest films screened at the Sixteenth Festival
were retrospectives of work made over fifty years ago,
Spies
by Fritz
Lang and
The Miracle of the Wolves
by Raymond Bernard. Beyond
these two, the new Chabrol, the Rohmer, and the Skolimowski, the
Sixteenth New York Film Festival tended to be respectable at the
expense of risk, interesting without being exciting. I like to see the
Festival as occasion for screenings of the most difficult and uncompro–
mising cinema-so little of it finds distribution these days-and not for
showings of made-for-TV look-a-likes like Robert Mulligan's
Blood–
brothers,
which already has its audience. The following are my
impressions of some of the more distinctive films.
A Wedding,
Robert Altman
Altman tends to insist in interviews these days that critics, mean–
ing reviewers, take his work more seriously than it is meant, reading in
symbolic implication where none is intended. One begins to suspect
that his insistent disclaimer of seriousness is at once disingenuous and
serious.
A Wedding
is a characteristic Altman circus, fast-paced, high–
pitched, edgily satirical, with more going on at any given time than the
senses can readily encompass. The wedding between Dino and Muffin,
between new wealth and old, is an occasion for a succession of satiric
revelations concerning forty-eight supernumerary characters. Some of
the revelations are insightful-their wit coming out of the exaggera–
tion of genuine possibility-but most, particularly as the film moves
