JONATHAN BAUMBACH
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scene
characteristically beautiful-and one admires the wit and audac–
ity of the conception, particularly the ending (a scene I was unable to
find in Chretien) where Percival imagines himself as penance enacting
the role of Jesus in a passion play. Finally, despite the power of
Frabrice Luchini's comic performance in the title role, the static
quality of the film becomes self-defeating.
It
is admirable to work
against the strictures of the medium-a narrative tension in itself-as
Rohmer does here and elsewhere, but in this case the rewards tend to be
minimal. It is for the opportunity to see films like
Percival,
unrealized
works of great originality and risk, that one values the New York Film
Festival most.
Spies,
Fritz
Lang
This is the first time
Spies
has been made available in its three–
hour version to American audiences. Fifty-one years after its initial
release, Lang's film about ubiquitous subversion is astonishingly
fresh. The issue behind the conflict in
Spies
is determinedly unclear.
The battle in Lang's films is not so much over issues or ideologies, but
between respectability and evil, between the compromised ordinary
world and the unscrupulous power seeker. As in the Mabuse films,
Lang invests evil with a terrifying potency. Good triumphs fortui–
tously, but the paranoid nightmare of Lang's world survives the film's
outcome. The master .spy, Haghi (Rudolph Klein Rogge), is a much
more engaging figure than the ostensible hero, the ineffectual lovesick
detective, Number 326. In the last scene, in his third identity, Haghi
plays out his final moment on a stage before an audience and makes a
triumphant gesture out of his defeat.
It
is almost as if this power-mad
demagogue were the controlling consciousness of the film. In its three–
hour version,
Spies
is a masterpiece, the major discovery of this
Festival.
Despair,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
This elaborate adaptation of an early Nabokov novel is the thirty–
one-year-old Fassbinder's thirty-second film. The films tend to be
impressive and unfinished, derivative and original, marred by brilli–
ances. Where early Fassbinder seemed to be influenced by Godard,
Despair
is in the manner of Alain Resnais. I use the word manner
pejoratively here. Fassbinder's first English language film has more
finish than most of his other work and less distinction and vitality. The
informing idea of the narrative has considerable wit. Hermann, one of
