MOVIE REVIEWS : Women in Film Festival Draws Innovative European Entries

It’s never easy to tell the overall impact of a film festival when only a handful of entries are around at press-screening time. But, from the relatively small sampling available of the 1989 Women in Film Festival, the differences in vision between European and American film makers have never seemed as clear-cut as they are here.

Somehow, European film makers have found ways to get non-mainstream visions onto their screens, intact. Allowed the room to experiment, they play with magic, with the surreal, with personal “crazy” visions, and their cinema is richer for it.

Not all of these notions work; one of the most magic-filled, poetic works in the program, the beautiful looking Hungarian film “My 20th Century,” is also one of its most boggy and impenetrable. Yet, in contrast, almost all the American films previewed seem to be strapped into the formula straitjacket, overwrought melodramas that yearn for homes on television the way lemmings seek the sea.

Certainly, the festival’s most inventive work is the personal vision personified; it’s “Joan of Arc of Mongolia,” a wickedly delightful look at the headlong collision of two cultures by writer-director-producer Ulrike Ottinger of West Germany. Using the worldly-wonderful Delphine Seyrig as her compleat voyager, widely traveled in every civilized sense of the word, Ottinger imagines a mixed group of passengers on the present-day trans-Siberian railway who are kidnaped by a young and commanding Mongol princess. Every sort of tension exists, sexual, cultural, generational and stylistic. Three of the kidnapees are members of the splendid Kalinka Sisters band, a ‘50s-style singing group (fiddle, piano, ukulele/guitar) whose musicianship is as formidable as their costuming. Another is the blue-jeaned Giovanna, a beautiful young student, who becomes something of a prize between the princess and Seyrig. Who could have believed that life in a yurt could hold this many temptations?

Sophisticated, mysterious and deliriously beautiful, “Joan of Arc,” at 165 minutes, may be one of those orchids that blooms only at festivals and for far too small an audience. If so, this is the time to take a chance on its utter unpredictability. If you happen to be especially attuned to costumes or jewelry, you could go for those alone, for the princess’s attendants in scarlet, acid green, pink and turquoise satin, riding camel-back or trotting on those short-legged, short-tempered ponies. (One warning: Among these Mongolian ceremonial events there is a prolonged ritual sheep-killing that is really unbearable to watch. Get a stainless-steel someone to tell you when it’s safe to look again.)

Best to see veteran Czech film maker Vera Chytilova’s “Snowball Reaction” without consulting the program notes. Although she seems happy to reveal her film’s tragic element in advance, no one really should. This crucial story peg doesn’t emerge until the film’s fourth act, but if you expect it, you almost want to fast-forward the rest of the film to that moment, thus missing the texture of this “La Ronde”-like series of interlocking love affairs by a group of playful Czech careerists.

A lot of “Snowball Reaction” depends on the improvisational skill of its young ensemble; they are, fortunately, first-rate, but you may (or may not) feel that the subject deserves even greater depth.

From Austria comes “Scorpion Woman” by writer-director Susanne Zanke, as interesting for the inner workings of the Austrian judicial system as for its story, in which a trial being conducted before a striking 44-year-old judge (Angelica Domrose) becomes a parallel for her tumultuous personal life. As a playfully begun love affair with her 23-year-old law clerk takes a deeper turn, the judge begins to empathize with the prisoner, a working-class woman accused of partially blinding her young lover. “Scorpion Woman’s” conclusion heightens its melodrama, making it too neat by far, but it’s intriguingly acted melodrama.

Lena Wertmuller returns with a story by novelist Giovanni Guareschi, “To Save Nine,” about a widowed peasant woman with nine children 11 and younger who hides their very existence when she rents a garret flat in Bologna from elegant landowner Dominique Sanda. Whether this one flies will depend entirely upon the character of the indomitable mama who, as played by Piera Degli Esposti, makes Giuletta Masina’s waif in “La Strada” seem cheerless and cynical. You may disbelieve and wish to throttle Esposti, or you may dissolve in tears. In either case, Sanda’s last seconds are surprisingly affecting.

Next come productions so measured, so numbing in their pacing that nothing the well-meaning actors do can save them. Into that category you must put “Romelia’s Secret,” a feature from Mexico by Busi Cortes, which also seems badly served by its subtitles, and two American entries, “The Kill-Off,” adapted from a Jim Thompson story by director-writer Maggie Greenwald, and “Face of the Enemy,” by director Hassan Ildari, about an ex-Iran hostage who stumbles onto and then kidnaps his torturer.

Greenwald’s skill would definitely seem to be with actors, not dialogue; her twisted noir -style plot comes apart at its seams and sags when it should cut like dry ice. There’s a kernel of an idea to Ildari’s contrived plot: how governments use and then abandon their point men and women, but he goes about telling it with a leaden hand, a horrific use of flashbacks and the most irritating musical score within recent memory.

There is also Lucy Phillips’ “Stealing America,” a woolly-minded exercise in attitude and chic, without heart, point, wit or substance. Somehow, possibly because it’s in black and white and has three young visiting Europeans as its central characters, its brash charmlessness has been compared to the control and the rigorous point of view of Jim Jarmusch. Big mistake.

Can these be the best that American feature films touched by women have to offer? That’s simply not possible. Perhaps good things lurk unpreviewed. Let us hope so, or either the selection process or the guidelines for submissions need drastic overhauling.

The festival will open Thursday night with a tribute to Lee Grant and with her dramatic feature “Staying Together,” in which she gets a glowing central performance from Melinda Dillon and a preciseness of observation about the real stuff within families that seems much too rare on the large screen today.