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"Every book burned enlightens the world," says Emerson. François Truffaut at Pinewood Studios, uneasy with the language but with Nicolas Roeg's camera and Bernard Herrmann's violins by his side. As in Godard (Alphaville), the Future is now: Bradbury's visionary regime is recognizably a Sixties tangle of antennas and wall screens, with both conformist and kook played by Julie Christie. Society has gone somnolent and onanistic, pacified by pills and TV programs. ("Brothers" and "sisters" are terms too intimate for the zombies, the state addresses them as "cousins.") The word has been banned, books are forbidden and tracked down, firemen are now crypto-Nazis starting bonfires. One of the troopers (Oskar Werner) numbly torches literary classics until one night he sneaks David Copperfield home and goes through it arduously, word by word, as if deciphering hieroglyphs. Rebelliousness boils down to the rediscovery of emotion, a bit of Dickens is enough to reduce one of the automatons to tears: "I can't bear to know these feelings. I had forgotten all about those things." Abstractions faced head on, not as science-fiction but as humanistic fairy-tale—even the Captain (Cyril Cusack) gets a tender close-up a second before being struck by his pupil's flamethrower. Hitchcock is the main tributary (Vertigo's reverie, Marnie's crimson fades, The Birds' schoolyard recitations), the demise of the Book Lady (Bee Duffell) is filmed like a remembrance of Dreyer's Day of Wrath. There's something of Resnais' Toute la Mémoire du Monde to Truffaut's democratic views into the pyre of books, with close-ups for Moby Dick, Chaplin's autobiography, The Thief's Journal, crossword puzzles, Cahiers du Cinéma and Mad Magazine. The ultimate rebels are diligent memorizers hiding in the woods, keeping Brontë, Carroll, Beckett, Sartre and Austen alive by carrying their works inside them. The protagonist chooses Poe and braces himself for "the next age of darkness," Weekend takes it from there. With Anton Diffring, Jeremy Spenser, and Mark Lester.
--- Fernando F. Croce |