The Moviegoer The Weekend's Movies

REPORT at Lowell House tonight WARRENDALE at Eliot House tonight

FILM societies are usually formed because their members are dissatisfied with the same old Fellini pictures, only to find that the financial hassles force them to book more of the same. Every so often someone takes a risk, brings something genuinely unconventional, and proceeds to get clobbered: two weeks later the notices herald that "great classic, La Stradu," once again. Tonight both Lowell and Eliot Film Societies are losing money, yet each is showing a strong, deserving film that we just won't see anywhere else.

Jan Nemec's Report on the Party and its Guests comes in the aftermath of a Czech film craze, but it's a more difficult work than those we've been used to: unlike the descriptive approaches of a Forman or a Menzel, Report is a highly stylized film, philosophically abstract and frankly allegorical. Nemec's earlier work, such as Diamonds of the Night , lacked these elements, so much of the credit for Report must lie with co-scenarist Ester Krumbachova, who also collaborated with Nemec on The Martyrs of Love and with Vera Chytilova on the brilliant Daisies.

An art director as well as a writer, Krumbachova concentrates on the details of psychological games as realized in decor and frame composition. She writes small scenarios, small in the sense that their limited worlds are closed off from the usual psychosocial references: small also in that they act out philosophical truths through seemingly banal confrontations. The Report is on a small group of guests who have been invited to a birthday party in honor of some mysterious official. On the way they are captured by the official's adopted son, Philip, and his boys, who force them to play commandante/captive games. The thoroughly bourgeois guests ("I like nice, well-cared for things," one says) choose to be submissive, though they promise each other that they will make a joint complaint. Philips adoptive father finds the group, admonishes his son, then leads everyone to his lavish outdoor banquet. One guest refuses what the others coo over as "an opportunity you don't get very often," and leaves; his departure irks both the ruler and Philip, and after some prodding the entire party sets off with gun and dog to bring him back.

Rooted in World War II or Cold War experience (depending on whether you believe socialist or capitalist commentators) the narrative is openly allegorical. Briefly stated, I suppose it's something like this: the foundation for collaboration with evil is to be found in the apparently meaningless capitulations we make in everyday life. But Report is better than allegory; unlike all those Profound Question-obsessed Bergman films you can't just plug in a simple meaning for each of the characters and explain the film away. The reason for this lies in the sinister, stark quality of Nemec's style, his refusal to locate any action with an establishing shot or relax the rigorous, inexorable pacing of his cutting-the most mundane activities thereby acquiring frightening overtones. And overlaid is a soundtrack which places each image at one inexplicable remove. Beginning with a parody of Hollywood climax music which comes to a syrupy end at the credits, then dribbles away in studio conversation, we are constantly set on edge by murmurs and whispering, grass too loud underfoot, a dog's bark that rises to fill the room.

LIKE Report. Warrendale was rejected by its sponsors: the official censure of Report found it too abstract and formalistic, while Warrendale was too earthy for Canadian television (and Titicut Follies too sensational for Massachusetts). With Wiseman's films Warrendale attempts to document the nature of institutional life using synchronized sound-recording and close shooting to situate us in the midst of events. Located somewhere near Toronto, Warrendale is a home for emotionally disturbed children; the film is what its maker, Allan King, calls a "persona record" of staff and patient life there.

A psychiatrist friend once told me that in therapy, as in show business, you gotta have a gimmick. Howard Lester's Children of Synanon keyed on The Game, a nebulously-defined situation in which a circle of adults and ten-to fourteen-year-old kids were supposed to get out front through continuous verbalization. Warrendale has the "holding session," which is spoken of as a physical vet loving restraint in which hostile feelings are "worked out." But since these holding sessions mean holding down every one of a child's limbs, physically demanding immobility, it's hard to see exactly how this helps to work things out. Further the staff seem to have problems with the idea-sometimes they wrestle a child to the floor when it's totally inappropriate; more frightening still, sometimes a child seems fine until some staff member precipitously grabs her arm. I can't pretend to know how effective this all is, but I know I don't like it.

What's most enduring, though, about the movie qua movie is the depth of intimacy between camera and subject, a depth which bespeaks much patience and long familiarity. Warrendale is neither the expose that Follies was not a panegyric like Synanon, but a complex view of an institution which isn't open to easy evaluation. It's clear that more such places are needed, yet it's also clear that personal as well as social obstacles are in the way; with the possible exception of Walter, none of the staff comes off appealing or even particularly competent, more like a group of Soc Rel Ph. D.'s who needed jobs. Despite a contrived hopeful ending (the kids walking down a highway) one leaves with a sense that nothing has changed, that the twelve-year-old girl who despairs of ever getting cut of institutions where people are supposed to love her may be the only one who knows what's really going on.