438
PARTISAN REVIEW
knowledge can go on forever. It's a movie that only a college town like
Austin could produce.
As usual, the New York Film Festival offered many other pleasures
and mishaps besides these American films. The opening night movie,
Va
Savoir,
was the work of Jacques Rivette, one of the great veterans of the
New Wave. As an Italian acting company performs a Pirandello play
before a Paris audience, the leading actress, who is French, and her Ital–
ian director, who is her current lover, get caught up in an intricate
round-robin of relationships, all handled by Rivette with surpassing del–
icacy. As a backstage drama about life and artifice, reality and perfor–
mance,
Va Savoir
can bear comparison with the masterpiece that
inspired it, Renoir's
The Golden Coach,
which featured Anna Magnani
in one of her great film roles. A less colorful yet very impressive film by
a younger French director was Laurent Cantet's eerie
Time Out,
the qui–
etly unforgettable story of a man who loses his job but doesn't tell his
family, continuing instead to go "to work" until his whole life becomes
a fictional construction, an immense vacancy in which he takes a
strange kind of pleasure. In the real-life story on which the film was
loosely based, the man eventually killed his family and his parents and
was tried in a celebrated court case.
Time Out
erases this lurid, melo–
dramatic turn, focusing instead on the daily round of a man who impro–
vises a double life for himself, including a made-up world that becomes
more real to him than his conventionally happy home life.
One of the mishaps, the feel-bad movie of the festival, was an Argen–
tine film by Lucrecia Martel,
La Cienaga,
that was surprisingly well
received by critics but made audiences thoroughly miserable. A study in
middle-class decadence, it centers on two families sweltering in almost
insufferable summer heat, like languid rejects from a Tennessee
Williams play. We see one couple, too alcoholic and indifferent to be
predatory, through the eyes of a curious, innocent, neglected child,
whose accidental but all-too-predictable death will sum up the director's
disgust with the people whose story she is trying to tell. At the opposite
end of the spectrum was a crowd-pleasing Mexican film, Y
Tu Mama
Tambien,
directed by Alfonso Cuaron, in which the corruption of the
upper middle class is cast in relief by the raging hormones of two
teenage boys who take off on a trip with an unhappy older woman, a
Spaniard played by Maribel Verdu, whose self-absorbed writer husband
is stepping out on her. Almost a take-off on an American-style teen
movie centering on horny adolescent males, Y
Tu Mama Tambien
deftly
gives this woman the upper hand, allowing her to take the boys not only
through deeper sexual territory but into a sobering encounter with life
