UNLIKE the annual cinematic extravaganzas at Cannes and Venice, there is no competition for awards and little commerce conducted at the New York Film Festival. New York has never given a prix, and usually most of the movies—this year more than half of the 24 selections—have been booked into American theaters anyway. Thus the New York festival, now in its tenth year, is primarily a social occasion. It has become an annual two-week ritual for movie buffs to gather in the lobbies of Lincoln Center, trade gossip, champion favorite films and, inevitably, castigate the witlessness of the selection committee, whose choices, nevertheless, were both diverse enough and shrewd enough to guarantee sellout houses. Among the more notable:
A Sense of Loss starts out as a straightforward documentary appraisal of the situation in Northern Ireland. Marcel Ophuls' monumental previous film. The Sorrow and the Pity, (TIME, March 27), brought shape and great emotional resonance to the memories of citizens of Clermont-Ferrand during its occupation by the Germans in World War II. A Sense of Loss shows the same extraordinary compassion for people, the same rare gift for making political history real in immediate human terms. The dilemmas of occupied France emerge more clearly after nearly 30 years than do the problems of a divided Ireland, which still rage. But if A Sense of Loss lacks the definitive quality of The Sorrow and the Pity, it has a desperate urgency all its own. Ophuls spent a month and a half earlier this year shooting all around Ireland, his subjects ranging from Bernadette Devlin and Prime Minister Jack Lynch to the arch-conservative Protestant preacher, the Rev. Ian Paisley. Ophuls has structured the film not on these interviews, however, but around the impact of meaningless deaths. Parents mourn the incineration of their adopted son Colin, 17 months old; a widow tells how her husband, a prosperous Belfast businessman, tried to defuse a bomb that blew him apart. Ophuls ends this superb and important film with memories of a teen-age schoolgirl killed accidentally as she rode home from a dance one night in an ice-cream truck. An innocent life, a senseless death: the fury and the contradiction and the hopelessness of the whole situation come down, for Ophuls, finally to this. A Sense of Loss is the cinematic essay at its very finest. Scrupulously fair, profoundly humanistic, undetected by rhetoric and propaganda, Ophuls is the Orwell of the cinema.
Summer Soldiers concentrates mostly on the plight of a rather vacant
G.I. Jim (Keith Sykes) as he skulks round Japan, looking for help and a place to hide after he goes AWOL. He is aided by sympathetic families, a bar girl, a truck driver and, ultimately, by a counseling group that convinces him that going back to base, then turning himself in, is the best thing to do. Hiroshi Teshigahara's previous film, Woman in the Dunes, (1964), was overburdened by a kind of febrile surrealism, but it at least demonstrated energy. Summer Soldiers is slackly directed in a trumped-up documentary style. Jim is a numbingly inarticulate spokesman for war resistance; like the well-scrubbed kids on any television series, he frets a great deal about his guitar and the stagnation of his songwriting talents. If Teshigahara sees much irony in this, he keeps it to himself.