462
PARTISAN REVIEW
a dybbuk, perhaps even to alter his whole life. Or sometimes you get to
do nothing at all-celebrity can be that boring-yet the chance of get–
ting inside someone else's skin appears irresistible. In short, going
through this looking glass becomes an inverted form of voyeurism, a
metaphor for shedding your skin and seeing the world through someone
else's eyes-except, in a perfectly surreal scene, when Malkovich himself
tries it.
Being John Malkovich
is more of a lark than a piece of reflexive
cinema: this fantastic voyage that isn't about anything so much as the
exuberance with which it was made.
It
conjures up a hideous conceit
and, with the amused participation of Malkovich himself, plays won–
derful and surprising changes on it.
Being John Malkovich
was one of several of the year's exceptional
films first exhibited at the New York Film Festival, still a bastion of the
avant-garde but now also the home of this new mainstream filmmaking.
All About My Mother, Felicia's Journey, Boys Don't Cry,
and
Topsy–
Turvy
were also featured, but so were
Rosetta,
Jane Campion's
Holy
Smoke,
Kevin Smith's sophomoric
Dogma,
and two daringly original
French adaptations of Melville, Claire Denis's spare, arid
Beau Travail
(very loosely based on
Billy Budd)
and Leos Carax's giddily romantic
Pola
X (an exhilarating version of
Pierre).
Once distributors were loath
to permit films with any commercial prospects to be shown at the festi–
val, for fear they would be stigmatized as Art; now it has become the best
venue for introducing serious independent films, whatever their origin.
As in contemporary fiction and music, this new middle ground in
movies was made possible not simply by the decline of the avant-garde
but by its assimilation into the mainstream-with uncommon themes,
fresh techniques, and challenging ways of telling a story. Once again
filmmakers have learned to make it new, but without feeling the need to
dismantle the medium and alienate the audience. This resurgence has
not only revived the film culture but made it fun to be a critic again . In
recent times this could be a numbing vocation, for it meant being con–
stantly exposed to the standard product, deadly beyond belief. You
could almost taste the sour boredom of many regular reviewers. For
those who grew up in the sixties and seventies, when every week
brought some new provocation, this was painfully disillusioning. Today
the major occupational hazard of film critics is being swamped by a
flood of new releases in the last weeks of December, opening just in time
to qualify for awards. But there are far worse troubles than having too
much to see.
