VENICE FILM FEST : A SURPLUS OF RICHES LED BY HUSTON’S ‘THE DEAD’

The irony of “The Dead” being John Huston’s last film before he died last month was not lost on the audience viewing the movie’s premiere at the 44th Venice Film Festival.

At the end of the screening, there was no immediate applause: just a hush of fulfillment as all-enveloping as the snow covering Ireland with a white transcendence in the film. A master film maker had passed on--but fortunately, as the outbreak of cheering confirmed, he left one of his finest films as a memento mori .

Just 83 minutes long, “The Dead” is one of those movies made with a deceptive ease that takes a lifetime to acquire. It belies its title, too, which Huston admitted in a 50-minute documentary about the film’s making, is a worry to him lest it put people off.

Most of it is given over to a joyous Irish soiree held in Dublin in the Feast of Epiphany in 1904 by two distinguished old biddies of the musical world who have invited friends and relatives for dancing, songs, recitations, gossip and roast goose. The detail is Dickensian and every character so clear cut by a cast of Dublin’s finest players that you could do a seating plan from memory as their jests, quirks and tete-a-tetes make a small movie swell with the resonances of a concerto.

Maybe Donal McCann hasn’t quite the inner music for the evening’s dying fall, as a husband experiences a soul-shattering epiphany of his own on learning he wasn’t his wife’s first or even foremost lover. But Anjelica Huston’s self-wounding aria for her old flame now buried in Galway gives the grace note to the film and, most touchingly, to her own father’s long life and work.

“The Dead” would have distinguished any film festival. But Venice this year had good films to spare. Among them were the following:

After more than a decade’s mixed fortunes in America, Louis Malle has returned to France and first-rate form with “Au Revoir, les Enfants.” The Venice audience wondered, what new could a Catholic boys’ boarding school show us in the way of sin? The difference turned out to be: this is Occupied France; and the sin isn’t the usual one, but racism.

After an entertaining Truffaut-esque overview of priests, boys, visiting parents and privations and compensations of wartime, Malle insinuates the terminal atrocity of the Gestapo and French collaborators rooting out the Jewish boys being sheltered by class and clergy in the name of ecumenical humanity. The ending stunned the audience as if they’d stepped on a land mine.

David Mamet’s debut as director, “House of Games,” artfully kept us bemused as Lindsay Crouse’s uptight psychiatrist lets herself be drawn into the world of con-men, fascinated by the tricks of “the sting,” thrilled by the danger and fatally charmed by Joseph Mantegna’s Chandleresque hero. What must be the most duplicitous script in years--”stinging” us the audience as well as Crouse--the screenwriter Mamet adds a brilliant unpredictability to the crooks’ tour of an Edward Hopper night-time world of predatory people and the subtle pastiche of a 1940s film noir.

Orion Pictures is planning a small, select October play-off for “Games”: a tribute to its off-beatness as much as to the difficulty of selling its novelty in a genre marketplace.

The Ismail Merchant-James Ivory “Maurice,” a follow-up to their “A Room With a View,” based on E. M. Forster’s posthumously published novel of homosexual manners in Edwardian England, had a mixed Venice reception. There was much admiration for its social panorama. But Maurice (James Wilby) and his lover, Clive, (Hugh Grant) are the most unheroic of heroes, and the young gamekeeper Alec (Rupert Graves) whom Maurice beds in the boathouse comes in fatally late to put a dramatic backbone into this piece of literary fidelity.

Italian cinema is still feeling the delayed shock of color TV and video and fell back on a sentimental naturalism out of the 1950s. But an exception was Ermanno Olmi’s winningly made comedy “Long Life to the Lady.”

In young Mario Esposito, Olmi’s found another of those awkward apprentices he loves: this time a serious-faced young waiter pitting his catering school tuition against the petty venalities of a grand hotel. Esposito is the sort of son Buster Keaton would have been proud to adopt.

Eric Rohmer, too, is another old master to whom youth is like a blood transfusion and his new entry in the “comedies et proverbs” series entitled, “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend,” has a tip-of-the-tongue sprightliness. A young girl wants to make a play for her flirtatious friend’s spare boyfriend, but allows herself too much conscience-searching. The background is as carefully chosen as ever: this time a new town near Paris, all shopping malls and man-made sail-boarding lakes that give a clean, modern look to love in the 1980s.

From Russia came an oddity named “Pljumbum,” after the teen-ager in it, a boy astonishingly like the young Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange.” The character this time, however, is a one-man anti-crime force in a small town, tagging along with the local cops, making citizens’ arrests, turning bums out of their shanties and generally making “good citizenship” into an unholy crusade that eventually comes home to roost in his own family. Directed by Vadim Abrasitov and scripted by Alexander Mindadze, “Pljumbum” is an accessible film to Westerners, but somewhat a wary quantity for Easterners still coping with the subtleties of glasnost . A reporter was told that for every Muscovite who’s seen it and welcomes it as a Gorbachev warning against authoritarianism, there is another who cheers it as a return to the good old discipline of Stalinism.

Of course every festival has its “idiot film.” This year it was the hapless Kathleen Turner who supplied the unintended laughs for an English-speaking nonsense made in Italy called “Julia and Julia.” It was shot on high-definition 1,125-line videotape, to sell a process that some believe will replace film stock by the end of the decade. Presumably Turner was here to help sell the film as a kind of “Peggy Sue Goes Time Tripping Again.” She plays a bride in Trieste whose husband is killed on their wedding day. Six years into widowhood, she opens the hall door and there he is, along with the son they wanted to have.

As her futurist family prove both moveable and impermanent, parts of the Venice audience took to advising Turner vocally to stay home, lest they not be there on her return. But such a film was one of the few “deaths” that occurred in Venice this year.

With such films on the program, the festival has recovered from the “cronyism” of Italian party politics and the over-literary films favored by its former director, Gian-Luigi Rondi. His successor, Guglielmo Biraghi, is appointed for one year only; but his term is renewable and generally most here hope he’ll be made permanent.

A director of the Taormina Film Festival, in Sicily, and a Rome film critic, Biraghi isn’t afraid of the pleasure principle. He personally picked some 23 main-section films and he persuaded Venice to turn the Lido’s lofty Art Deco casino into a spacious new cinema (since some countries had threatened to boycott the festival if it didn’t improve its facilities). The act ended the battle between art and anatomy that had literally marked media folk in earlier years who endured the improvised cinema.

Biraghi also cut out the commercial fat that has caused the artistic degeneration of other festivals. So no nascent film market this year; no video sidebar events; not even the midnight matinees of Hollywood blockbusters designed mainly to keep the punks off the piazzas. He scheduled, simply, good films, a few revelations and a well-attended 21-movie tribute to writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.