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Ritt's Spy Who Came in from the Cold makes for a useful point of contrast, Zinnemann's Behold a Pale Horse even more so. The weary "professional revolutionary" (Yves Montand), a Spaniard in Paris, "the only fake element in this story is me." He once wanted to be a writer and now masquerades as a UNESCO interpreter, merely one of the identities worn in and out of Franco's regime. No fan of Lorca but a steady believer in patience and irony ("a Bolshevik's virtues"), with a bogus passport that catches the eye of the passionate activist (Geneviève Bujold). (She has liftoff during their lovemaking, a lyrical collage of body parts in defiance of the purposeful sterility of Godard's Une Femme Mariée.) "A landscape of exile" everywhere he goes despite the handsome anchor of the harried mistress (Ingrid Thulin), who's got pictures scattered over her apartment floor in preparation for a book of images, a telling detail in Alain Resnais' structure. "A closed world, unsettled and full of snares," to keep the struggle going is its own struggle, radicalism ain't what it used to be. The Old Left is a huddle of baldpates still hoping to overthrow the dictatorship with clandestine bull sessions, the New Left has baby-faced "Leninists" and valises filled with explosives. Past and present, Spanish and French, borders and barricades. Concrete details amid the abstractions, the secret missive squeezed out of a toothpaste tube and the painstaking pasting of a photo on a forged document, above all Montand's melancholy holding the temporal flurry together. A dazzling Resnais impasse, the old agent's constructed realities. ("A broader perspective" is what he yearns for, "even if it's unreal.") Faded flag in the graveyard, hopeful dissolve at the train station. Losey in due time checks back (Les Routes du Sud). Cinematography by Sacha Vierny. With Jean Dasté, Michel Piccoli, Anouk Ferjac, Paul Crauchet, Jean Bouise, and Bernard Fresson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |