Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [78]
Although Pauline definitely had her favorites among directors, her New Yorker reviews were, from the beginning, full of surprising reactions. She went out of her way to praise a movie that few saw, Greetings, directed by a twenty-eight-year-old filmmaker named Brian De Palma. Greetings wasn’t in the macabre vein of the later films that made De Palma famous but was an off-kilter comedy about three young New Yorkers trying to keep from being drafted, and it had been shot in two weeks for very little money. Rutanya Alda, who played a supporting role in the film, recalled how the tiny budget made it essential to work fast and accurately: “Brian would say, ‘I’ve got only three minutes of film—we’ve got to get the scene in three minutes.’” Locations were snapped up wherever they could arrange them cheaply: one sequence in a bookstore was shot at three in the morning without the owner knowing about it. Pauline acknowledged that some of Greetings was a mess, but she also recognized a vibrant, original talent; Greetings went on to win the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Pauline noted De Palma as a talent to watch.
During her first year at The New Yorker she also experienced some unexpected reversals of opinion. Her longtime readers were particularly caught off guard by her review of Ingmar Bergman’s Shame. For years she had struggled with Bergman’s body of work and had come to the conclusion that she had no temperamental affinity for much of it. She loved the humanity the director showed toward the foolish lovers of Smiles of a Summer Night, and the contemporary wit and sensibility he brought to his medieval allegory The Seventh Seal. But Wild Strawberries, a major breakthrough for Bergman on the international art-house circuit, had left her both dissatisfied and unconvinced, and once he had gone into his long series of films that probed man’s attempt to unravel the mystery of God’s silence, Pauline had gradually lost interest. It was not simply, as some have suggested, that Bergman’s tempo was too slow for her, or that she disliked contemplative films; it was that she questioned the profundity of the dilemmas he was setting forth on the screen. She was deeply suspicious of the way Bergman had been turned into a cultural hero by college students who, she felt, didn’t grasp how simpleminded many of his ideas were. (“I did my own share of soul-wrestling,” she once said, referring to her youth, “and it’s not too tough to do.”) She was uncomfortable with the sort of unwritten contract Bergman had with his audience, in effect asking to take them by the hand and explore the spiritual crises that were plaguing his own life, over and over, in film after film.
Pauline believed Shame, however—a study of the ravaging effects of war on a married couple (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) living on an island—to be a significant artistic step forward for Bergman. Shame succeeded, in her view, because he had reversed direction and made “a direct and lucid movie . . . Bergman has pulled himself together and objectified his material. There are no demons, no delusions. Everybody is exactly who he appears to be, so we can observe the depth and complexity of what he is. There is no character who may or may not represent Bergman; he is not lost in the work but is in control of it, and is thus more fully present than before.” She thought that Shame had an “almost magical lack of surprise; it has the inevitability of a common dream.” There is a strong indication that she was comparing Bergman with Godard when she offered this observation:
In film, concentrating on a few elements gives those elements such importance that the material