ERRATIC : This Year’s Films Were Like a Roller-Coaster Ride

The movies of 1986 were on a roller-coaster curve, which swooped upward in the early months with films like “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “F/X,” “My Beautiful Laundrette,” “Lucas” or “Turtle Diary”; leveled off into the blahs--or worse: “JoJo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling,” “Sweet Liberty,” “Cobra,” then climbed again sharply in the last third of the year with “Stand By Me,” “Malcolm,” “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Blue Velvet,” “Down by Law,” “The Color of Money,” “True Stories” and many more.

The result has been a year that deserves a special place in film record books. 1986 might be subheaded Eclectic Film Mecca--never before have we had so many movies quite without precedent, startlingly original statements that, whether they made it to year-end lists or not, deserve special notice for being produced without equivocation.

It is also the year of the writer-director, with all the control and the clarity of vision that that might suggest. When you notice that Woody Allen, David Lynch, Oliver Stone, Agnes Varda, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Alex Cox, Jim Jarmusch, Bertrand Tavernier, Michael Mann and Spike Lee (to pick at random) are all what Variety likes to call “hyphenates,” you suspect that a writer’s desire to see his or her words emerge intact may have shaped more than one directing career.

This may also be remembered as the year that the British beachhead--secured last year with “Dance With a Stranger” or “28-Up”--was absolutely reinforced with “Mona Lisa” or “Absolute Beginners” or “Defense of the Realm.” And in a pincer movement, the Australians gave roaring notice that they are alive and very well, mate, with that affable blockbuster “Crocodile Dundee” and the irresistible “Malcolm.”

If there is any particular handwriting to be read on movie studio walls in 1986, it is the increasing importance of the independently made film. More than half of this year’s best have come to us this way, and hand in glove with that statistic is the rise of small, nurturing, distribution--and in some cases production--companies. With the death of virtually all the classics divisions at the major studios, a channel that had a perilously short flowering and a lingering death, these small companies seem to understand the urgency of their job of guiding a good independent film to its audience.

And here in Los Angeles, the past year has also seen the opening of more theaters that specialize in the non-mainstream film. In a decade in which videocassettes have changed the moviegoing habits of millions, we have at least a few doughty exhibitors who’ve set out consciously to make moviegoing an event again (an event to something beyond our pocketbooks).

To recall some of the high points of this year, this is my own collection of 10 of its very best, followed by a very strong second string:

1--”Hannah and Her Sisters.” The maturing of Woody Allen; a fine film, as confidently balanced as a gyroscope, in which the pride of Flatbush Avenue casts a gentle and generous eye on a trio of marvelous sisters--Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest--and all who love them. The list is not uncomplicated, nor is the working-out of this urban, and urbane, lust. However, “Hannah’s” strongest feature is the bemused warmth with which writer-director Allen regards the foibles of everyone involved. That would certainly include Allen’s own character, a comedy writer forced into an examination of What It’s All About. The answer is as pungently good as any guru’s and a lot funnier.

2--’Blue Velvet.” Certainly the year’s--and possibly the ‘80s--most controversial film, called everything from blasphemous to soulless, David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” also deserves the words brilliant and astonishing . A film about the dark pull of sexual secrets, it is set in what seems to be an idyllic American small town that turns out to be as violent, as drug-ridden and as depraved as a bordello in Algiers. Throughout his film’s often harrowing excesses--and its almost sappy contrasting sweetness--it is Lynch’s absolute control and painterly vision that wins the day. And who’s to say, in an era of headlines like our own, that this view of the rot under the placid surface isn’t horrifyingly close to the mark.

3--”’Round Midnight.” In his tribute to the black American bebop musicians of the 1950s who emigrated to Paris, Bertrand Tavernier has shaped his sublime, mournfully elegant film in the rhythms of the music itself. It has long, sustained passages, repeated themes and a perfect, delicate gravity about it. Some of the timing is Dexter Gordon’s own--the legendary tenor sax man’s performance is couched in idiosyncratic, unhurried phrases. But underlying everything is the music and an all-encompassing aura of respect--and love.

4--”Platoon.” This is a film that burns with Oliver Stone’s passion to show us what Vietnam felt like from an infantryman’s point of view, down there at ground zero--where Stone himself saw it in 1967. It is warfare without “the big picture,” or seemingly with any picture at all, in a life devoid of reason, or sleep or reprieve. Stone still makes some of his points by melodrama, and he’s framed his lethal coming-of-age story with an unnecessary narrative as the untested, idealistic, autobiographical Charlie Sheen reads his letters home, but these are minor quarrels in the face of Stone’s massive achievement. “Platoon” doesn’t apologize, but it does explain, unflinchingly.

5--”Room With a View.” The well-oiled team of Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala has made delicious work of E.M. Forster’s romantic comedy of manners, in which the gloweringly pretty Lucy Honeychurch tries to squelch passion in favor of convention. The resulting muddle very nearly ruins the two men in question and the patience of sundry lookers-on. Everything about this film is right: its sublime cast; its settings, from Florence to Surrey; its music, performances and ecstatic tone. All that--Denholm Elliott and Daniel Day Lewis too. Imagine!

6--”Mona Lisa.” This wonky love story has been described as the story of the princess and the frog, from the frog’s point of view. Might need to mention that in Bob Hoskin’s pugnacious performance, it’s a frog definitely born within the sound of Bow Bells; the princess is a young, reigning London call girl and the setting is London’s expensive one of vice and venality. It’s an odd spot for idealism to flourish, but flourish it does. Director Neil Jordan tells his unusual fable in so lush and seductive a visual style that it’s like a color-chrome of emotions washing over you. And these actors are spectacular, Hoskins and tall, lean Cathy Tyson--the fireplug and the lamppost.

7--”Betty Blue.” English love for “Mona Lisa,” cataclysmic French amour fou for “Betty Blue,” the third and most assured of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s films. It looks at the passion of a volatile, pouty young beauty for a drifting, content odd-job man, whom she discovers has written a book. At least Betty calls it a book; publishers call it a disaster. Beineix’s power is to draw us to the center of this tempestuous love affair, to feel its magnetic pull as strongly as we sense its imminent doom. Evenly matched, brilliant central performances and great style are the hallmarks of this one.

8--”My Beautiful Laundrette.” The brashness, audacity and complexity of the themes of young playwright Haneif Kureishi tackles are half the film’s delight; the other half is the wit and assurance of Stephen Frears’ direction. The subject is London’s second-generation Pakistani, some newly rich, some not; all crippled by the long shadow of Empire. There are at least two, perhaps three love stories here, the most arresting of which is that between a nouveau Pakistani Laundromat entrepreneur and a South London gay punk, the second of Daniel Day Lewis’ remarkable performances this year.

9--”Stand By Me.” This is the third of this list’s coming-of-age stories (“Platoon” and “Blue Velvet” are the other two); a perfectly performed look at the raunchy, ribald, unswervingly loyal friendship of four 12-year-old boys on two pivotal fall days in 1959. Ostensibly, their trek is to try to find the body of a young missing boy; director Rob Reiner steers the story carefully into deeper emotional water: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Fiction. In this situation, ear and naturalism are all and Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon’s adaptation of Stephen King’s acute novella has exactly the ear for the boys’ gross-out banter, while Reiner’s touch with his young actors is absolutely fine.

10--”Vagabond.” Agnes Varda’s haunting portrait of one young vagabond, whose life ravels out before our eyes, makes the loss of one stand for the plight of many. She is played with ferocious intensity by Sandrine Bonnaire and it is the care that she and Varda have taken not to sentimentalize Mona, the drifter, that makes “Vagabond” the searing experience that it is. In a mosaic of interviews that have the shape of a tightening spiral, we begin to see that every one of life’s actions has a counter-action and that what Varda is examining most intently is the very meaning of freedom itself.

Also notable: “The Mission,” “Something Wild,” “Down by Law,” “Malcolm,” “About Last Night . . .,” “The Color of Money,” “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “F/X,” “Absolute Beginners” and “Half Moon Street.”