On View: Innocence Abroad

Benjamin Franklin enjoyed a long season in vogue among the sophisticates of Paris; the good Quaker, they called him, the plain, simple colonial in homespun, sagely ladling out aphorisms seemingly newly sprung to mind, all this while he merrily slept his way through half the better boudoirs in town. Americans have more recently taken on a somewhat less charming image, when abroad: despoilers of the land, in the worst cases, or at least vulgarians on the lam, the “ugly Americans,” a term understandably twisted out of a book of the same name whose title referred to the good guy, not the clods.

But for the longest time, through the self-congratulatory literature churned out by puritans of every age on returning home from wicked Europe, on to the cinema until very recently, the standard vignette has been Purity (America) corrupted or at least contaminated by decadence (Europe). It helps to be an American when suffering those soothing delusions. It also helps to be naïve.

Which, after all, is what the innocents abroad fantasy is all about: we Yankees in whoever’s court are God’s very own children, and ain’t it a shame that the Old World is over the hill! You can still amaze your neighbors on Main Street by pulling out some piece from Time reporting that within receiving distance of the Vatican one may tune into television programs featuring not only total nudity but actual acts of sxl ntrcrs. And there are, it is reported, parents still parenting who, upon dispatching their prides and joys to Europe for the first time, dispense a familiar wisdom boiling down to a categorical: don’t. Our youth, abroad, are the model of innocence, abroad.

We come now to four recent films playing around the edges and in one case going right to the heart of that particular idea. They are thoroughly modern movies in technique, but quite wonderfully antiquated in orientation. It is as if America, land of the triple-X-rated sex shoppe, hadn’t yet been invented.

French Postcards

French Postcards is the quaintest of this lot, a mild, well-mannered little comedy about young Americans, collegians, enrolled for a year in a private academy in Paris, sent there by mom and dad to learn the language and absorb the culture and maybe even prepare themselves better for life in our shrinking world. The story concentrates on two young

men, Joel (Miles Chapin) and Alex (David Marshall Grant), and one young woman, Laura (Blanche Baker), and on their bedtime frolics and emotional churning. The boys have come to Paris for differing reasons, Joel to muddle through French and bury himself in work, Alex to sleep around and Experience New Adventures; Laura is determined to visit every one of the several hundred distinguished locales touted in the Guide Michelin, to strew flowers upon the toniest graves in the better cemeteries, and to energize her ancestral juices by devoted attendance at some, if not all, of the better medieval pageants. Their plans are quickly jostled about by happenstance and the designs of others, whence comes the fun and the charm of a slight, almost totally pleasing minor film.

For Alex there looms the forbidden fruit of the older woman, Mme. Tessier (Marie-France Pisier), doyenne of the school, whose husband, M. Tessier (Jean Rochefort), finds his pleasures with another lady. The school mistress first spurns Alex’s leering attentions, then seeks her revenge on the monsieur by inviting Alex home, and not for coaching in his verb endings. The boy is the very perfect image of a surfer: blond, clean-cut, an Ultra-bright ad in corduroy britches; the lady, a paradigm of what ails the Old World, or what Americans like to think ails the Old World: an unyielding itch for hot young American flesh. Alex’s adventures in wonderland provide the semi-erotic aspects of a film otherwise lacking them. Joel is a puppydog, or at least Miles Chapin is a passable facsimile thereof, and his affair is far more standard: Toni (Valérie Quennessen) sells him student supplies, resentfully, and only because of a practical joke played upon the two by Toni’s friends does Joel find himself between the sheets with a girl instead of forever poring over weighty treatises at his desk. Little need be said of Joel and Toni except that their romance goes entirely by the (contemporary) book: she seduces him, he likes it, they romp into the sunset. And Laura? She falls prey to a post-Ayatollah Iranian living in lecherous comfort in France, and flees from that into the arms of Alex, who, having dwelled in darkness, has seen a great light, and abandoned his older woman.

Mlle. Pisier and M. Rochefort work happily at the task of coping with English and add for Europeans (who see the movie and, no doubt, dissolve into complete hysterics in the aisles) familiar names, familiar faces, tried and true talents of the French cinema. The young actors are new to the profession and somewhat raw at transforming their native goods (pleasing looks and squeezable bodies) into something resembling acting. They are all promising, little more at present, but ideal for French Postcards, which, while you wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to Aunt Edna in Des Moines, you might confidently pencil in for some otherwise dreary Saturday night. The burden of its message is that innocence abroad can be trained but never wholly ruined.

Yanks

Yanks is John Schlesinger’s elegant tear-jerker, lovely, finely acted, continuously graced by knowing, apt touches, and so static that it could as well be sold, frame by frame, to collectors of World War II nostalgia items. This is the story of American soldiers in England prior to the invasion of Normandy, neatly divided by class, each Yank with a British lass, the tales intertwining now and again, at other times branching off into separate compartments, the whole tidily wrapped up when the bunch of them go off to the continent to liberate the good guys from the Hun. Vanessa Redgrave, who must one day be unleashed to play a Queen, plays here the proper wife of a fine man, the mother of a fragile son, and the mistress of an American officer (William Devane). She sews things for the soldiers and wraps bandages with the other village ladies, she lends her name to the right charities and delicately balances her wifely responsibilities and those required of an American soldier’s English lady friend.

Richard Gere, whose career is taking off with the surety and speed that he demonstrated as the jock-strap zany in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, is the lower-middle-class American, the company cook; Lisa Eichhorn, an American in real life, and, like Gere, suddenly a hot property in films, plays his lower-middle-class English girl friend, properly resistant to his polite advances at first, later the somewhat more aggressive partner in their getting down to business, an occasion, by the way, that takes nearly as long to come to its point as any audience could be expected to endure. And there is Danny (Chick Vennera), whose tongue tends to lap about his navel when he spots a broad—he talks like that—and his broad, Mollie (Wendy Morgan); they are of the proletariat, and they take about three minutes to meet, fall in love, marry, and set about perpetuating the race.

These Americans in 1943 are not, of course, portrayed as gentlemen virgins off on a spree, entrapped from here to eternity; they are red-blooded models for their socio-economic strata, the sort of fine Yankees who gallantly went off to serve the cause of decency, and can you blame them if, lonely and lost in a sea of fish-and-chips-devouring limeys, they need a little lovin’? Yanks is so wholly satisfactory to look at that it seems churlish to complain about the difficulty of paying attention to it when its characters insist on speaking. Gentility pervades it, passion seems intrusive within it, energy appears utterly foreign to it, so reined in are its characters, so soothing is its tone. Yanks is a triumphant evocation of gesture, so well-meaning it cries out to be loved. It is splendidly acted, by men and women triumphing over lines that only John Schlesinger could love. And it is a synecdoche of countless familiar stories about the stranger in a strange land, finding his pleasures in the natural way, tempered only by local custom. As such it shrewdly embodies and agilely tailors the myth of innocence on foreign soil, touched though not de-spoiled by the foreigners. Overfed, over-sexed, and over here: it’s all there, from the tritest British slogan coined during that peaceful occupation, to the most cherished memories of those who did the occupying and then, with or without a European bride, came home to construct their personal versions of How I Won The War.

Henry James, we have been instructed recently, never quite got over his adoration for his brother, William. Was it more than brotherly love? You’ll never prove it by reference to his letters or to his books, but the implication inches its way up to the surface, as if in a permanent haze managing if only in outline to suggest itself somewhere in the background of much that he wrote and much that, evidently, he regretted. Not only did James transpose himself into the European context; he also came back repeatedly to the theme of the cultural disharmonies, the cultural jarrings — “clashes” would overstate catalysts. The Ambassadors brings a paragon of middle-class New England rectitude to Europe to rescue a probably lost son of America from the clutches of Old World vice; Daisy Miller portrays a frisky American lass dis-combobulating the leaden ogresses and enchanting the scintillating bon vivants of Europe. And The Europeans, James’s third novel (1878), piled all the baggage onto an American platform and flipped the whole saga of innocence abroad onto its back. The Europeans brought a near-penniless Baroness Münster and her bohemian brother, Felix, to the outskirts of Boston to look up, and, they hoped, hook up with, their wealthy, deadly-dull New England cousins.

James Ivory has directed and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written the screenplay for a resolutely stodgy yet somehow remarkably statis-fying film version of this early James novel, considered by many, among those who can stay awake reading James, as one of his very best works, far less maddeningly convoluted in its prose than the heavier items that he inflicted upon readers later, far more straightforward in its theme, undeniably thought-provoking in its implications. If the film looks at times as if its real stars were all the autumn leaves of New England and a handful of houses done up for a Famous House tour, still it does little disservice to the tone of the book; and in its most adept moments it is a showcase for an Idea —the idea we’ve been discussing — brought to the screen exactly, precisely.

The Wentworths of the Boston outskirts manifest every imaginable perfection, of their type. The patriarch (Wesley Addy) gives off the aroma of faintly pickled rectitude, an Ionic column in a temple of his own making; his son, Clifford (Tim Choate), is scrubbed and tidy and prickly with late adolescent heat, which he cools in tankards of ale, since A Woman is as yet beyond his capacity; the daughters are immaculately conceived Charlotte (Nancy New) and the less handsome but no less pristine, albeit considerably less self-sat-isfied Gertrude (Lisa Eichhorn, again). The Unitarian minister might as well be the mirror image of Hester Prynne’s undoer, so comely but righteous is he, and so hopelessly in love with Gertrude, who of course falls instead for cousin Felix (Tim Woodward), who paints and poses and charms her like a cobra romancing a mongoose. Neighbor Robert Acton (Robin Ellis) sees possibilities in the hard-strapped Baroness Münster, and since the lady is in search of a rich husband, she notices more than a few possibilities in him. Lee Remick pours into her Baroness Münster all the subtleties of her acting range; if one hadn’t seen her nearly cornering the market on cinematic hysteria in a half-dozen meaty, proto-late-Bette Davis parts, one wouldn’t recognize her or at least wouldn’t quite place her, in her mid-century frocks, weaving her worldly continental net to catch Mr. Acton. Remick’s is a performance in the best tradition of inward fire held firmly in check by surface ice: it is among the handful of smoothest performances by an actress in the films of 1979, wrapping up in a faultless package a great deal of Henry James’s not so idiosyncratic notions about the strange effects a more sophisticated culture can have upon one less so. Would that the movie advanced the Idea just a bit further. Mr. Wentworth is described by Felix as a man who looks “as if he were undergoing martyrdom, not by fire but by freezing,” and the picture of the man becomes the picture itself. Glacial pacing is not out of step with Henry James’s tempo, but movies, by definition, move, and this one is more or less paraplegic.

And yet, how deliciously it sums up the concept. Granted, the innocents here are at home, not abroad, but even if the corrupters — and a less sordid set of invading siblings could scarcely be conceived — have set out for the sticks to work their act, still the expectable relationship has yet been maintained: where the Baroness and brother Felix park, there is the locus of the tender trap; where the impeccably fine Wentworths then step, that, for them, becomes their “Europe,” if not, necessarily, their undoing. The Europeans ends with half the visiting duo packing up to leave, one of them hitched to an American “catch,” the other going back to Europe to be “appreciated” properly. How is it that The Europeans has only now, so long since its appearance as a book, been transported to the screen? Maybe the theme, however grandly swaddled in the finery of James’s prose, touches just a bit too sharply that happiest of American delusions: that we can only be badly affected by them, over there, since if they come here we’ll clean ’em up overnight.

Now how may Bernardo Bertolucci shock us this time? He has given Pauline Kael a decade to recover from her ecstatic reaction to Last Tango in Paris; he has allowed us the same interval to forget the awful sight of Marlon Brando’s rump in the buff. He has in Luna come back to hand us a dose of mother-son incest and he hopes we’ll like it. America hasn’t liked the idea very much, not us, not in the land where demagogues can get extra mileage out of their crusades to save our children from unspeakable perverts who lurk in classroom closets ready to leap out and devour the darlings. Little the case — the cultural matter that the bulk of what we call child molesting is inflicted upon children by their parents and their parents’ spouses and their parents’ best friends and their parents’ brothers. And so in Massachusetts last year an adult brother and sister, who were separated at an early age, met later, when they were grown up, and chose to marry, ran afoul of the law, which gave them about thirty minutes to re-pent, unmarry, and promise never to connubialize again. We are more than a bit un-nerved by incest, and always on the alert to clamp down hard on the one instance in a million where it is entirely consensual and between adults, while just as ready to pretend that the infinitely more common kinds, dad-dies preying upon their offspring, and kindred variations on the theme, do not, in fact, exist. America, land of the free and home of the hypocrite.

So Bertolucci knew where he could touch a nerve and stretch it raw. And while he caused the sensation he sought, and brought Luna into disrepute everywhere and curious audiences into it in droves, he kindly granted us timid Yankees two considerate pegs on which to hang a mental disclaimer: he never quite allowed Cater-ina (Jill Clayburgh) to make it with her son Joe (Matthew Barry) — she masturbates him through his trousers and she forces his head, later, down almost to her panty-clad crotch — and he put the whole wretched thing over there, in Europe. The kid is all-American, if, in the guise of Master Barry (who plays a fifteen-year-old, is seventeen in real life, and looks nine), a trifle androgynous — he is all-American in the States, before the man he thinks is his daddy dies, and before his mom schleps him along to Italy for her operatic concert season. But once he hits the streets of Rome, watch out!

in bile by apoplectic critics who take Luna as some sort of apology for mother-loving, or son-corrupting, or what-have-you, reviews written to wash away the stain by wiping out the movie: whisk, and it’s gone. Luna, however, is a colossal put-on, a sumptuously mounted, exceptionally well photographed film — Vit-torio Storaro, than whom there are no betters in the business, directed the photography — presenting Jill Clayburgh in a role that rescues her from a succession of parts that have lately threatened to embalm her in frosting, and missing perfection only in the casting of the too-pretty and insufficiently sensual Master Barry. These are the mother and son who, to stay together, almost get laid together, and these, please observe, the Americans who only do such nasty things when they settle down in darkest, poshest Rome.

Can the preposterous dogma of innocence abroad be more subtly, more hilariously, more engagingly exposed for the poppycock it is, than here? Bertolucci wants his audiences to squirm in their seats, to storm out of the theaters mad as hell and resolved not to take any more of this, and maybe, later, when they stop to think about what’s been done to them, to finally get the point of the joke and abandon the Idea, once for all. People who’ll believe that this neurotic Ur-Mutter and her petulant, self-indulgent son would only show their true stripes abroad, will believe anything. And those who accept the truth — why, they’re free.

Overnight the boy goes from frolicking with the local lasses to throwing tantrums and shooting heroin into his sweet little veins and picking up but only toying with an older man who buys him the proverbial sugary drink — it’s all quite by the book of how Dirty Old Men are expected to behave. And when your typical American teenaged apple-cheeky scion starts messing with demon dope, what is a mother to do? Especially if the mother had earlier been married to an Italian mamma’s boy, who fathered Joe? ‘Neath the seducing Italian moon, the image that gives the movie its name and gave Bertolucci his happy conceit for the film, this particular mother must rescue her son by offering him a sexy mommy instead of a needle.

It sounds quite awful in the telling, though it’s exquisite on screen, gorgeous, but an infuriating tease. I have roared aloud reading two dozen reviews written

LR’s film critic is Deputy Sheriff of Middlesex County (Massachusetts) and film critic for WNAC-TV (CBS) in Boston. He also hosts New England’s leading radio talk program, “The David Brudnoy Show,” on WHDH-AM. © Copyright David Brudnoy 1980