Gerard Depardieu plays Marais as an old, much-honored man reflecting back on the teacher (Jean-Pierre Marielle) whose monklike devotion to music set the standard against which he would always judge himself a failure. We first see Marais half asleep at a court rehearsal: his bloated, powdered face a crumpled pudding of flesh. Then we see him as a young man (played by Depardieu’s son, Guillaume), entreating the grumpy Sainte-Colombe to take him on as a pupil. It’s the ascetic who is director Alain Corneau’s hero-a man who shuts out the world when his wife dies, retreating to a cabin to play his viol and compose his haunting music. Marais is a man of the world, ambitious for success, breaking the heart of Sainte-Colombe’s daughter (Anne Brochet), whom he loves and abandons. Sainte-Colombe, a tyrant of abnegation, belongs to the world of the spirit, literally making music to wake the dead: when he plays, the ghost of his wife appears to him. This is a movie of passionate formality and hushed intensity; you have to adjust to its contemplative beat. The rewards are plentiful: glorious music and a sorrowful, moving drama of two men who wielded art as a weapon against fate.
The minimalism of the wonderful Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki (“Ariel”) has a mulish, deadpan kick that lands somewhere between Robert Bresson and Buster Keaton. A sardonic humanist with an affinity for life’s stoic losers, he’s at his most severe-and amazing-in this fiercely compacted 70-minute fable. Without sentimentality, he lays out the dead-end existence of his wallflower heroine, Iris (Kati Outinen), a washed-out working girl with a tedious job, loutish parents and no hope of romance until she blows her paycheck on a red dancing dress and finds herself in the bed of a slick Finnish Yuppie with a sports car. Her mortification is complete when he dumps her and leaves her pregnant. It is then that Iris strikes back, enacting a revenge upon the world that is awesome to behold. ImplosiveIy funny, “The Match Factory Girl” never raises its voice, but you can hear it scream.
DAVID ANSEN
almost was. This documentary about art and censorship, made by Paul Yule for British TV, was withheld from U.S. distribution for more than a year because of a lawsuit by the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the antipornography crusader who is interviewed in the film. Wildmon labeled the film “blasphemous and obscene trash” because it includes the very images that he has sought to suppress, such as the photographs of homosexual sadomasochism by Robert Mapplethorpe. “Damned in the U.S.A.” examines the issue of federally subsidizing such controversial art work through the National Endowment for the Arts. It also tackles the question of censorship, focusing on the charges against the rap group 2 Live Crew for their explicit lyrics.
We see Sens. Jesse Helms and Al D’Amato ranting against filthmongers allowed to slurp at the public trough. There are scenes from the obscenity trial of Dennis Barrie, director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, where Mapplethorpe’s photographs were exhibited. A Florida record-store owner is arrested for selling an album by 2 Live Crew. The anchorman for the attack force is Wildmon, who turns out to be not an on-the-make opportunist but a true believer of staggering sincerity.
Making the case for artistic freedom and First Amendment rights are figures from the arts and entertainment world. Rapper Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew calls their songs a “mirror” of inner-city life. Throughout the film, Yule cuts to Boston stand-up comic Jimmy Tingle satirizing the bluenoses. But nothing Tingle does is as hilarious as an episode from the Cincinnati trial, in which a curator is cross-examined about a Mapplethorpe S&M photo. The prosecutor frames his questions in terms of body parts-forearm, anus. The curator couches her answers in formal esthetic terms-center, symmetrical.
This surreal scene is a microcosm of the problem: art and law talk different languages. What comes through in Yule’s film is that the system is working. In a closed, Soviet-type society the state expunges what it can’t abide. In an open society, periodic outbursts against free expression are inevitable. The ensuing battles clear the air and clarify the issues. You win some; you lose some. That’s freedom, not the absolutes of artists or politicians. The courts allowed this movie to be shown. The Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center was acquitted. 2 Live Crew beat the rap. Next case, America.
JACK KROLL
