Alive and Well in Europe

By RICHARD CORLISS, Richard Schicke

Three good reasons to consider reading subtitles again

As laughs, tears and special effects carried Hollywood to one of its most popular years in the U.S. and abroad, European film makers were finding it harder to attract attention, especially in the American market. The "art houses" of the 1960s, where a United Nations of cinema once reigned, now play host to mainstream movies from the suburbs of Los Angeles. Critics' groups, which had regularly knighted Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, now bestow their awards on Steven Spielberg and Sydney Pollack. With many American critics, moviemakers and moviegoers on a slumming spree, the intellectual cachet of European films has been broken. But there is still cinematic ingenuity to be found outside the U.S., and sometimes even in U.S. movie theaters. Three encouraging examples:

TIME STANDS STILL

1963. High school. Don't Be Cruel and Tutti Frutti. Philip Morris cigarettes. Fast times and slow dancing. Rebels without cause. Budapest. (Huh?) It would seem that what Jean-Luc Godard called the Coca-Colonization of Europe made an early conquest of Eastern Europe too, worming not just into jeans but into dreams. The ecstasy of fear flashes on a teen-ager's face as he dares to sass a sadistic teacher, and one can trace the punk-heroic contours of James Dean. Seven years after the Soviet-crushed revolution, Hungarian youths want only to escape, if not to America then into its music and attitudes. But escape is an adolescent fantasy; maturity comes to these engaging kids when they realize they are stuck where they are, glued to themselves and their society.

Director Peter Gothar displays the teasing visual intelligence of the very brightest film-school graduate. He is forever calling attention to his devices, such as putting his camera on roller skates, pixilating the images, and then, at the last moment, flummoxing the viewer's expectations with an ingenious twist. Like just about every Hungarian movie that reaches the U.S., Time Stands Still is a handsome piece of work, with suffused lighting and a gray, ominous mist that hangs over the characters like a nuclear cloud. But there is verve sparking all of Gothar's calculation, and his young actors (notably Sandor Soth and Maria Ronyecz) prove as adept at miming edgy idealism as any gang outside Hollywood High. A few weeks ago, Time Stands Still was deemed best foreign-language film of 1982 by the New York Film Critics Circle. It is certainly one of the sleekest and easiest to enjoy.

--By Richard Corliss

THE STATIONMASTER'S WIFE

"Hanni, my love--you whore, you dirty bitch, you devil, you trashy wench, you poor darling sweet saintly Hanni!" Xaverl Bolwieser (Kurt Raab), a Bavarian stationmaster, has every reason to curse and care for his wife Hanni (Elisabeth Trissenaar). She sets his nights ablaze with her Lorelei beauty and passion, but she doesn't really love him. She loves making love, and so she exercises her power in one of the few ways open to a woman in 1920s Germany: by becoming an entrepreneur of lust. Promiscuous as a prancing stud, possessive as any hausfrau, Hanni drives "Fatty" Bolwieser to the twin dominatrices of drink and despair. Called to court, the cuckold testifies to his wife's fidelity while she dallies with two of the village's men on the make. Logically enough, the court later throws Bolwieser in jail--four years, for perjury--and Hanni, the modern woman tired of her little boy lost, sues him for divorce.

Writer-Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died last June at 36, was a cauterizer of the German body politic. In the 1977 telefilm (reduced from three hours to 110 minutes for theatrical release), he portrays Hanni and Xaverl not simply as predator and willing prey but as victims of both economic hypocrisy and puritan prurience. Nor is the viewer exempt: he must peek at Hanni's lovemaking through frosted train windows and the billowing lace curtains of the middle class. The leading actors are exemplary: Trissenaar, porcelain-skinned and angel-faced and scarily self-possessed, and Raab, the perpetual slow schoolboy horrified by the games adults play.

--R.C.

COUP DE TORCHON

Cordier's duty is to protect the innocent; the trouble is, as he ruefully observes, no one is innocent any more. In the circumstances, the policeman's unhappy but bitterly logical lot is to help people accomplish efficiently the evil to which they aspire. In the course of this process, many will manage to do themselves in; the rest will find themselves in such a weakened condition that they will be easy prey for even the laziest lawman. In Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate), Director Bertrand Tavernier has had the good sense to cast Philippe Noiret, the underplayer's underplayer, as his seemingly indolent and ineffectual gendarme. Not so much as a knowing smirk crosses his angelic avenger's face as he sets most of his relatives and friends (including his mistress, played by Isabelle Huppert) on their self-destructive courses. When Cordier draws the bottom line on his moral accounting, two petty criminals, his mistress's brutal husband, his own shrewish wife and her doltish nephew-lover have all been neatly written off as dead liabilities. He can now face the calamity of World War II with his own small set of books balanced.

Tavernier (The Clockmaker; The Judge and the Assassin) has enhanced the chilling irony of Jim Thompson's Southern-gothic novel Pop. 1280 by setting it in the blazing heat of French colonial Africa circa 1938. His script, written with Jean Aurenche, has a way of sneaking brutal truths home in comic forms that range from the bon mot to the shaggy-dog story. The film is all very dislocating: the audience does not expect to see black comedy played out in bleached-white settings or to find the soul of an existential epigrammatist lurking under a rumpled bush jacket. It is also tough, smart and marvelously unpredictable.

--By Richard Schicke This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.