156
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
desolate, impoverished backwater, with its comic relief and contradictions,
follows the girls from before they are able to properly walk or talk until
they make friends and manage to function in their village. The story is not
just a tribute to female emancipation and liberation, but to the human spir–
it. Although its universal message is clear, I'm sure that I missed some of
the subtleties of Islamjc law.
The clash in val ues also provides much of the al1lusement in
Dr. AkaJ?i,
a film based on a novel about a doctor in a seaside village in Japan, who in
1945 is more concerned that so many of his patients are succumbing to
hepatitis than about the outcome of World War
II.
In his passion to create
a microscope powerful enough to discover the cause of hepati tis, he is
helped by a wounded Dutch soldier and his devoted nurse (she sometimes
earns money as a prostitute to help out her brothers). This unlikely story
of a doctor constantly running fi·om his lab to his patients, and to the mil–
itary he despises but has to hoodwink, is redeemed by its astute
combination of humor and suspense.
Of course, misunderstandings due to changing values are the price of
progress as well as the grist for hUl1lor. In
Black Cal, White Cat,
one of the
heroes, a garbage dump magnate, easily manages to outfox the other hero,
the shifty Matko, who after a failed attempt to steal a train promises to have
his (unwilling) son (who is in love with the sexy barmaid) marry Matko 's
diminutive, stubborn sister. As could be expected, in a fable where the
bride escapes through a trapdoor and runs away under a hollow tree stump
and then meets the man of her dreams, there is a happy ending topped by
a double marriage. Yes, every coarse joke and deformi ty is played to the
hilt in this rural backwater, where, to the accompaniment of gypsy music,
no pratfall goes unnoticed. Flocks of geese as well as lonely geese abound.
In this region , as in agrarian Upper Austria where the story of
77,e
inheritors
is set, geese are an important staple-their feathers keep inhabitants
warm during cold winters, and they not only are eaten but their abundant fat
is used for fiying, spreading on bread, and liver pate. This story too benefits
from the splendid use of the camera that induces us to believe this utopian
vision, which eventually changes the social order-even though some of the
main characters end up dead.
River
(!f
Cold,
a Portuguese tale that reenacts a
hundred-year-old crime of love and jealousy, is yet another improbable narra–
tive, which its director has redeemed by his stunning takes of the
landscape-including underwater scenes-and has almost rendered plausible
by his versatility.
In
Khrollsta/iov,
My
Car!
humor and suspense are also entangled . The
director told us at the outset that the critics in Cannes had walked out
during the screening, and that in COl1lmunist times Russian films had
gained their reputation by "being kept on the shelf" for at least four
