PERFORMANCE (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

James Fox gives a scalding, brilliant performance as Chas, a vicious East London enforcer hiding in a faded rock star’s mansion following a killing that his boss had warned him not to commit, in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance. Chas becomes unexpectedly helpless as he more deeply enters the drugged, delirious, androgynous realm of Turner, the rock star (Mick Jagger, okay—and riveting when he sings). Each young man is forced to confront subconscious elements of personality that test his survival. The experience proved discombobulating for Fox, who left acting and fled into religious retreat for nearly a decade before (thank God!) regaining his sanity and resuming his career.
     “I know who I am,” Chas tells Harry, his boss. But, like the rest of us, he only thinks he does. Before being picked up and escorted to his finish, Chas is drawn into a transformation of himself—including wig, costume, makeup—that blurs the distinction between him and Turner, and between him and others—females—in Turner’s house. Chas’s face becomes Turner’s; a small hand mirror attaches a woman’s breast to Chas’s naked chest. Indeed, this is a film full of mirrors and reflections off glass. Fleeting confirmations of identity ironically underscore the vast terrain of human mystery always gaping below one’s idea of oneself. At a point when he still believes he may elude mob capture and death, Chas, masquerading as a juggler, pleads with Turner to rent him the basement room: “I’m determined to fit in. I’ve got to fit in, Mr. Turner.” (Cammell wrote the script.) But this will not be possible based on who he “knows” himself to be.
     This kaleidoscopic film suggests the piecing together of a puzzling identity—and the disintegration into chaos of Chas’s preëxistent role.

MURMUR OF THE HEART (Louis Malle, 1971)

When he told his mother that he wanted to make films rather than be a banker, the legend goes, the bourgeois woman smacked Louis Malle. We have been told that Malle’s best loved film, Le souffle au coeur, is partly autobiographical; but apparently Clara Chevalier (Lea Massari, sensuous, sparkling) is the mother that Malle wished he had had. Italian, married to an older man, and to a gynecologist for gosh sake, and adulterous, Clara is the film’s most interesting character. So often she is into her own head, far away, because of her separation from Italy and her consequent loneliness in Dijon, France, her greater attachment to the youngest of her three sons, sensitive Laurent, than to his father or his wild, cruel brothers, her uncertainty as to how to be a mother, much less a French mother. Clara and Laurent have sex—just once, and without damaging fallout. (Of course, Malle’s actual mother was incapable of easing into warm, delightful intimacy with her son.) Malle’s comedy is about adolescent unruliness, the busting of taboos. At 15 Laurent has smoked, gotten drunk, been to a brothel (where he doesn’t get anything done); now what? When he sees his mother naked in a hotel room tub, Clara slaps him, but she knows she is at least partially to blame for the blurred boundaries between them. Having sex with her son introduces him to new tenderness—same-age sex follows—and makes amends.
     Laurent’s heart murmur signals his vulnerability, while his homeopathic “cure” at the resort hotel that he visits with his mother exemplifies his resilience, adaptability, openness to possibilities. We root for this likeable kid—this smart kid, who isn’t fooled for a second when his priest “measures” his growing thigh with a nervous grip.

YOL (Serif Gören, 1982)

Heavy, tedious Turkish arthouse melodrama, The Road is more interesting for its history than in and of itself. Scenarist Yilmaz Güney, an ethnic Kurd, could not film The Road because he was a political prisoner of Turkey’s military regime. Therefore, his assistant, Serif Gören, shot the film. Turkey had had a military coup in 1960 and military interventions in 1971 and 1980.
     Each of a group of ethnically diverse prisoners is given a week’s furlough. Each encounters family and related issues. This is a schematic, dull film, not any sort of compelling depiction of political oppression. Turkey has given us beautiful films, among them Dervis Zaim’s Somersault in a Coffin (1996), Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Kasaba (1997) and Clouds of May (1999), and Yesim Ustaoglu’s Journey to the Sun (1999). The Road does not compare with these.
     On the other hand, it is somewhat better than The Wall (Duvar, 1983), a prison drama that Güney directed on his own.

SWEET ADELINE (Mervyn LeRoy, 1934)

Count this one of the great Hollywood musicals of the 1930s. You may recall that Andrew Sarris, disparaging Mervyn LeRoy’s filmography in general, considered Irene Dunne’s performance in his turn-of-the-century Sweet Adeline as being “worth any number of clinkers.” Indeed, Dunne is magnificent as Adeline Schmidt, who, following her father’s foolish advice, trades in a loving boyfriend, a struggling composer, for a military man who ultimately wants to “keep” her without benefit of marriage. The music and lyrics are by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, the film being sort of based, that is, apparently remotely, on one of their plays.
     It is ex-boyfriend Sid Barnett’s Broadway show that takes Adeline out of her father’s beer garden and makes her a star. Too bad that Elysia, who thought she had the lead role sewn up for herself, now wants to kill Adeline. Elysia is also a foreign spy!
     The opening swooping crane shot into the beer garden is awesome and magical, and its import becomes clear only later. Know this much in advance: performance scenes of the show-within-the-film, in the manner of 42nd Street (1933) and other “stage musical” films of the time, impossibly stretch the bounds of the presumed stage, with lovers, for instance, taking a stroll that no theatrical stage could accommodate. But here this isn’t all delightful nonsense. Rather, the film reveals as it unfolds a remarkable confusion, even conflation, of film “reality” and stage performance. What would prove so hokey in François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) works stunningly here, eventually causing the jaw to drop and tears most generously to flow. I don’t know whether the film is indebted to the musical play in this regard, but Erwin S. Gelsey is credited with the screenplay. It revolves around a brilliant conceit.