Barbara Baby

FILM-MAKERS who are also Harvard students eventually encounter a difficult subject: the Harvard Experience. Film being a means of self-expression, kids rightly want their films to be about what most affects them and what they know best. Movies with other subjects-gangster films, horror films-end up as hollow parodies because student directors have no personal involvement in the concerns of the genre.

But if you want to make a personal film about Harvard, what material and methods do you choose? The way this college affects most of its students is very indirect, ideological, non-material. A film about Harvard's concrete, material effects, though a fine political documentary, would be irrelevant to our personal experience. On the other hand, our experience of Harvard depends so much on trivial incidents, details of personal style, facades, momentary impressions about people and situations that creating a coherent plot and characters is very difficult. Most student films fail, and end up extremely subjective.

The perfect solution is a musical-a type of film in which style (its basic currency) and ideals (its subject) have freedom without getting too heavy. Brian Kahin's new Barbara Baby is more successful than one could expect. It investigates our dreams through idealistic characters whose flair infects the film. Inventive camerawork-pixillation, fantasy sequences, beautiful cutting-establishes the characters and their Panachethrough their appearances-and simultaneously exposes their shallowness, the characters, the limitations of their flair. The film, through its characters, maintains the ideal balance between being moving and shallow, romantic and absurd-not by attacking romanticism, but by showing its limits.

While the images and songs are making the film personal by concentrating on attractive kids, the narration details and analyzes the characters' ideals, the great American drama of growing-up. But here too a balance is achieved by pushing cliches too far, by filling the narration with put-on. The subject of the film remains these ideals as they influence the characters, but Kahin's control of this material and his objectivity toward it never lapse.

Of course there are a few quibbles. The songs repeat their best lines ("You always used to be a virgin/ But it's so hard to tell these days") too often. A few scenes (a slap, a mugging) seem contrived. But the film is so well put together that these are at worst minor hitches, and at best strange contributions. Its shortness gives every excess, every idiosyncracy, a function in character establishment. The excessive repetition of line and gesture, for example, makes the characters look a little silly: it balances their very romantic notions and intense self-attention. Humor like this, putting the real sympathy these people evoke into perspective, is a blessing in an art and a college whose method these days is undisciplined over-seriousness