EDITH KURZWEIL
Impressions of the 36th New York Film
Festival
On
balance, this year's crop of films chosen for the New York Film Festival
included fewer productions dealing wi th ghastly crime and gory violence
than last year's, and those that did, for the most part, ended up having the
lawbreakers pay up and the audience concluding that ultimately criminals
will die or land behind bars. Wi th minor exceptions, the actors and the
photography were superb and thereby tended
to
redeem and make believ–
able even the most outlandish, entertaining tales. Among these, I would
award first place
to
Blark Cat, r,Vhite Cat,
a crazy,jubilant fable set in a back–
ward region of Yugoslavia, played mostly by non-professional gypsy actors
who cavort on the shores of the Danube and in the nearby woods.
Altogether, the directors focused on their stories, and the best of these
were full of surprises and ambiguities. l"teferences to literature abounded,
if not in the films themselves, then in the press conferences. For instance,
two stories by Pirandello (the first one about a man who can't stop laugh–
ing, set in fascist Italy in the 1930s, and the second one about two
kidnappings-in the distant past and in the 1980s) were the explicit take–
offs for the Italian film
TIl
ridi;
Oscar Wilde inspired
£.flvet Goldlllille;
an old
Austrian folk tale was adapted in
The illheritors;
and movie clips of
Frallkellsteill
were shown in
Gods alld MOllsters-a
take-off from the book
about the director of
The Bride
4
Frallkellsteill,
James Whale (Ian
McKellen), who ended hi s life as a melancholy recluse. This story revolves
around his fantasies about, and subtl e proposi tions to, his handsome pool
boy (Brendan Fraser)-incl uding a scene of naked young men cavorting
around that pool-which al leged ly indu ced the director to commit suicide.
As we know, art films are as much entertainment as art, if only because,
in order to be distributed and shown, they need commercial backers. Thus
they play
to
the
Zei((!eist,
no matter how much their producers claim to be
at the cutting edge of the
avallt-,(!arde
(whatever and wherever that may be).
Moreover, since movie-making itself has become a glamorous profession,
the buzz at the press showings is about directors, producers, and actors, their
track records and potentials; about finances, distributors, and deals. Thus
one overhears disparaging comments that rarely hit the reviews, questions
about why one film or another was chosen to be incl uded in the first place,
