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, I , I with the kinds of people he has populated the screen with. Many of those people weren't actors before Forman started rolling the camera down in Ken Kesey's neck of the Oregon woods, and one might easily anticipate such an arrangement leading to a tension between the tentativeness in the way nonprofessionals grope for their roles and the director's attempt to capitalize on their hopefully unpretentious behavior in front of the camera. To a point, Forman does let the actors' roughhewnness work towards a more "realistic" flavoring, much in the same way that Cassavetes, using nonprofessionals, can coax forth performances that seem natural and, usually, painful evolutions of dialogue and emotion. But Forman's frequent use of facial close shots (comparable to Cassavetes as much as to Bergman) doesn't just serve to index emotional intensity, nor are those faces coldly scrutinized as though one side of the screen (or camera) had nothing to do with the other. Instead, Forman tends to explore his characters in a way that makes it appear that the actors are taking a large hand in defining the roles they play (which in fact they are) while the director eclipses himself to the extent of encouraging spontaneity and trying to have the camera pointed in the right direction when something flickers between the characters. But it's never quite that simple. Forman's use of a nonprofessional cast probably does contribute to some of the unstudied-seeming portrayals. It's the director's efforts, though, that makes those portrayals an interconnected whole. Especially in the group therapy sessions where intercut reactions form an important integrating thread in the ebb and flow of temper and sympathy, Forman, like Cassavetes, is particularly concerned with creating a credible totality of interrelationships from which the camera can pick and choose the nuanced supporting bit as well as the central THE MAGIC FLUTE continued from page 33 film's most delightful achievements: to have us thinking, by the time it's all over, that all the seemingly different shadings of both Bergman's and our perception finally rotate in the penumbra of Art. In other guises, maybe that has been Bergman's "message" all along. The kingdom, though, is not self-enclosed this time, as it was in Cries and Whispers, nor is there that sometimes uneasily taut polarization between the stiflingly realistic overtones and the undercurrents of pure poetry running through the dialogue of Scenes from a Marriage. Nor, for that matter, is there much hint of existential parlor tricks a la Passion of Anna, wherein each of the four main characters, at some point during the movie, takes a moment to sit back, not as the character he/she portrays but as the performer he/she is, and reflect upon the part's genesis within him-/herself. The closest Bergman comes to anything like that in The Magic Flute is when Erland Josephson's face is momentarily caught among the members of the audience that Nykvist's camera is doing its best to transform into an expressive visual counterpart of Mozart's musical overture. There is no real point to be made. Josephson is simply there to hear The Magic Flute like the rest of them. And yet one can't help but feel a twinge of life-meets-art headiness at seeing a regular Bergman actor -and sometime writing collaboratorin a Bergman movie watching Bergman make that movie while at the same time partaking of the emotions and responses contained within it, and hopefully extending beyond it, touching the surface of our own expectations of art. for during that opening performance of focal dialogue. With Cassavetes, however, this actual uncertainty as to what's going to happen next, where the camera will go now, is tied to a strong feeling of improvisation that Forman only infrequently tries to bring off, usually with Nicholson in the immediate vicinity. In one scene early in the movie it works particularly well. Me- Murphy has just arrived and has already had a chance to threaten the subdued ambience of the ward while strolling around a group of card-playing patients who are trying to pass a quiet morning. Now he's meeting for the first time with Dr. Spivey; Spivey starts asking those deceptively amiable, condescendingly frank questions- "Why do you think you're here, McMurphy?"-when McMurphy notices a photograph of the doctor holding a huge chinook salmon by a chain. McMurphy starts asking questions about it, and the doctor, perhaps sensing an opening for "communication" with his patient, follows right along. The whole thing is slightly ridiculous: McMurphy ends up wondering if they weighed the chain as well. It works, however, because, whether it was carefully scripted or not, the halting, exploratory way in which they run through it makes it seem freshly and refreshingly improvised, especially in contrast to some lines that come a moment later during the interview -lines nudging almost uncomfortably at some kind of Big Theme about the relativity of madness and violent behavior ("Rocky Marciano knocked out 40 guys and he ain't in jail"). Laid out in such cutely paradoxical terms, the point seems too easily digestible, again perhaps because it's enclosed within that point of view-McMurphy's point of view-that we're sometimes led to accept at face value without closely examining the less palatable underside of McMurphy's selfdestructive temperament. Rick Hermann sequence of briefly-glimpsed faces something happens, or should happen, to us: as we watch an audience listening to the overture of The Magic Flute, our act of seeing comprises an overture in itself. We are struck with the perhaps obvious but nevertheless suddenly reaffirmed importance of what it can mean to people to sit before a work of art and derive meaning, pleasure, and sustenance from it. In that sense the audience in the movie certainly mirrors the audience in the movie theatre-or hopefully does so; but the image is not so much a simple reflection as it is a distillation and translation of something we are seeing into something essentially about what we see. The people in The Magic Flute's audience arc not just there, but there radiating all the variables of complexity, wonder, and even (maybe especially) innocence that ought to define what it
means to be moved by an opera, a movie, a painting, a song, or whatever you happen to meet up with. As the movie progresses, and as the opera gets under way, we begin to glimpse the actors offstage; but again, as with the audience that is more than just an uninvolved sea of prettily photographed individuals, what we glimpse is charged with just enough stylization to carry the momentum of illusion off into the wings and leave a residue of our suspended disbelief to settle around the characters. Ulrik Cold/ Sarastro reads from a folio of Parsifal; Josef Kostlinger/Tamino and Irma Urrila/Pamina play chess and caress one another while they wait in the dressingroom for the next act; Birgit Nordin/The Queen of Night takes a drag from a cigarette and lazily proffers a hand to a makeup girl who bru shes it with powder; Hakan BETWEEN FRIENDS Direction: Don Shebib , Screenplay: Claude Harz. Cinematography: Richard Leiterman. Editing: Shebib, Tony Lower. Music: Matthew McCauley. The players: Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Parks, Chuck Shamata, Henry Beckman, Hugh Webster. One thing about Canadian director Don Shebib, he gives an actor room to stretch out. Too much room, some viewers feel. Shebib is obviously willing to risk viewers' impatience with yet another long take, a la Cassavetes, of his anti-heroic "boys" horsing around, yet another closeup of some guy struggling to put his inchoate feelings into words. When these indulgences fail, you get one of those arid well-whadda-youwanna-do-tonight-Marty? patches. But when they work, you may get a passage as moving as Joey's (Paul Bradley's) heartfelt, tipsily self-revealing speech at his own wedding in Goin/ down the Road. It seemed to me that in Between Friends, Shebib's third feature film, he and his' co-editor Tony Lower deployed a fairly sure sense of just how long things can profitably be allowed to run. Mixed in with the fraternal banter and the inevitable medium- and longshot scenes of the young rowdy men at play are more quick shots than heretofore, catching people's reactions to each other, their significant and sometimes comic gestures, fleeting facial expressions, eye contact, avoidance of eye contact. And when you do watch those two bosom buddies, intoxicated with each other's company and with nostalgia for their adolescence (the film's original title was Get Back) slaloming drunkenly, on roller skates, amongst beer bottles set up at midnight in a Toronto gutter, the scene, though thematically important, is kept mercifully short. Furthermore, against the boys' beerily Hagegard/Papegeno wakes up from a nap just in time to tumble downstairs, insert a perfectly timed trill on his reed flute, and wander onstage not a moment too late or too soon. The performance, obviously, is not confined to the stage, although Bergman trusts the proscenium when what it shows seems a sufficient chunk of the action, and, like Olivier in the best of the Shakespeare movies (Henry V), makes no big issue of shifting from one narrative plane of reality to another. (Indeed, Olivier too used a "live" audience to create a similarly layered texture comprised, in an ordering that moves progressively towards a reality that could be most handily termed cinematic, of the movie audience, the audience watching Shakespeare's play, the actors in the playas they exist on stage, and those same actors swept into a stageless context of pure illusion.) Bergman, happily, manages to capitalize on his . prerogative to cast a cinematic spell and at the same time to stay out from under Mozart's feet. His stylistic intrusions into the whole affair are unprofound but significantly reflexive. For instance, the first face we see on screen is that of a young girl, goldenhaired, round-cheeked, lips a-glistening as though she is tasting the first notes of the overture that has just begun. We see that little girl a lot during the . course of The Magic Flute, and if the subtly shifting tonalities of her expression are not a part of the performance, they are at least an index of our own sensitivity to what is going on up there under the lights. Bergman seems to relish the idea of such an intimate exchange being presupposed by our honestly felt response to Mozart's opera. Rick Hermann sentimental perspective on their own merriment Shebib now explicitly juxtaposes the perspective of a partly amused but mostly disgusted third party: Bonnie Bedelia. Bonnie Bedelia. I saw this actress for the first time many years ago in a made-for-TV movie called (I think) Then Came Bronson. It was a pilot for a series, and like many pilots, it was a hell of a lot better than the series that followed. Her co-star then, as in Between Friends, was Michael Parks. Parks played, as usual, a drifter; monosyllabic, self-contained, mumblingly Brandoesque with a core of strength and a nice line in not-meant-to-mortally-wound sardonic humor. He finds himself unexpectedly saddled with a pampered poor little rich girl (Bedelia) and while they're on the road he "tames" and humanizes her. They also, naturally, fall in love. For this modest pilot, Bedelia delivered In Between Friends she does it again. But this time we're deep in the cinematic Canada country described by Canadian Forum critic Robert Fothergill in his definitive article "Being Canadian Means Always Having To Say You're Sorry (The Dream Life of a Younger Brother)". This time it's Parks, the male, who's feckless, weak, out-of-touch with his feelings; and it's the female who is strong and mature, if a bit stymied by the refractory nature of the charming boy-man she loves. The Parks character, Toby, drifts up to Toronto where Ellie (Bedelia) is living with Chino (Chuck Shamata in a beautifully judged performance), a bumptious young man who works as a short-order cook and is hatching a big heist with Bedelia's father, fresh out of the slammer. In their palmy Southern California days, some six years ago, Toby was young Chino's surfing mentor and they were a duo: The Best on the Coast. Toby the Drifter drifts into consenting to eo along with his old buddy on the forthcoming job, a 37
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