The Return of Tanya : Schrader’s Film on Patty Hearst Kidnaping Is the Talk of Cannes

Incroyable!

Patty Hearst sat at the Carlton Hotel Bar here, in the middle of what is reputed to be the world’s second-largest regularly scheduled gathering of journalists (after the Olympics). And nobody noticed.

“There were no paparazzi, nothing, we just had our drinks and no one bothered us,” said Hearst, who was in the company of her husband, ex-cop Bernard Shaw.

If anonymity was sweet, it was also short-lived.

By Friday afternoon, Hearst was off to a Cap D’Antibes photo session with Helmut Newton for Vanity Fair magazine. By Friday night, she was the talk of Cannes, as reporters and film festival jurors began streaming to successive screenings of “Patty Hearst,” a Paul Schrader-directed film about her kidnaping ordeal.

The movie has provoked some obvious questions here: Why Hearst? Why now?

Fourteen years have passed since Hearst’s abduction, on Feb. 4, 1974, from a Berkeley apartment by the mock revolutionaries of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Reborn as the “urban guerrilla” Tanya, Hearst was convicted of bank robbery and weapons violations more than 12 years ago. After serving time in a federal prison, she was pardoned by then-President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

In the interim, there were a half dozen major books and a TV movie about Hearst, not to mention seven Newsweek cover stories.

But Schrader decided to do Hearst again, partly because “her saga has the force of folklore”--and partly, as he candidly explained in an interview at the Hotel Du Cap, he wanted the work.

“I was depressed,” said Schrader, describing his frame of mind last summer as he began casting about for a quickly available project to help shake off the self-acknowledged failure of his last film, “Light of Day.”

His agent showed him the “Patty Hearst” script written by ex-journalist Nicholas Kazan (“At Close Range,” “Frances”), and Schrader said, “Yes.”

The resulting film is as unrelenting as “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” which Schrader wrote and co-wrote, respectively, and as weirdly offbeat as “Cat People” and “American Gigolo,” which he directed.

Hearst is played by Natasha Richardson, daughter of actress Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson.

Having seen Richardson as Mary Shelley in Ken Russell’s “Gothic,” Schrader says he chose her for her “survival” powers as an actress. She is in virtually every scene of “Patty Hearst,” from the 57-day brainwashing in a closet through the imprisoned heiress’ bitter decision to mount a William Randolph Hearst-style media campaign for release from prison after her legal appeals had failed.

The film tells the story--based on Hearst’s own book, “Every Secret Thing”--through the victim’s eyes.

“I’ve always liked the opportunity to (side with) someone you wouldn’t normally take the point of view of, a psychopathic cab driver, a thug boxer, a gigolo . . . .” said Schrader, as Hearst listened, without remark, from across a coffee table.

It wasn’t easy.

Shortly before shooting started, said Schrader, he asked friend and fellow director Brian De Palma how he could master the closet sequence, in which a blind-folded Hearst, sinking deeper into sensory deprivation, never sees her captors.

“It’s an impossible problem. I don’t see how you can do it,” De Palma told Schrader.

In the end, Schrader used trick lighting and hallucinatory scenes to create an effect that Hearst now describes as “surreal,” “avant-garde,” “very interesting” and generally “true in spirit” to her experience.

It is apparently a measure of Hearst’s own legendary survival powers that she claims to have watched a rough cut of the film, twice, without undue trepidation. “If I’m going to watch it at all, I haoe to be detached. . . . (But) I think it will make people very uncomfortable,” said Hearst, who at age 33 is pretty and confident, and looks more the heiress today than she ever did during her aborted UC Berkeley career.

She now lives in the New York area with two children and her husband, who is an officer and director of the Hearst Corp.

Hearst said she found the most chilling part of the film--which is slated for U.S. release by Atlantic Entertainment Group in August--to be an opening sequence in which the SLA stalked her.

Told that Schrader had cut the scene in order to keep the film entirely from her viewpoint, she said: “That’s too bad.”

Hearst met actress Richardson only briefly over lunch and wasn’t involved in the production, except to offer a long memo suggesting that details be changed to make the script more realistic. Schrader generally complied.

Hearst insisted, for instance, that SLA members Bill and Emily Harris should use political terminology in a marital dispute. “Instead of (calling each other) just, ‘You insect,’ they would have fought in pseudo-revolutionary terms,” said Hearst.

Schrader said he didn’t speak with the Harrises--now out of prison and living separately in California--but he did contact Wendy Yoshimura, a later SLA associate who now works at a juice bar in Berkeley. “She wasn’t happy about having the whole thing brought up. But she didn’t try to block it or anything,” said Schrader.

Hearst, for her part, is stoic about her notoriety, which seems to ebb and flow according to a timetable of its own.

“I can go for several years, then all of a sudden all the morning news shows call for no apparent reason,” she said. “People don’t seem to lose the fascination. So when it comes up, I tell myself, ‘Well, all right. That’s what’s happening now.’ ”