Coming to the Cinema II The Strawberry Statement

HERE they come, indistinguishable from hula hoops and other fads. It's the new "Youth Market Cinema."

Perhaps the most blatant pitch in a movie of this sort, is the Strawberry Statement, even though the movie does not star Elliot Gould. It is scantily-written and over-directed in a cinema gullibilite style. Director Stuart Hagmann has taken a heavy hand in his zooms, tracking shots, cuts, and dissolves in a desperate attempt to obscure the transparency of Israel Horovitz's script. Horovitz himself is a very concerned, intelligent man, and even makes a cameo appearance in this movie, but his screenplay has little of the punch of his plays like Rats, or The Indian Wants the Bronx. One thing to be said in his favor is that he is not entranced with adolescent lingo. The director on the other hand has taken the movie as a challenge; how to create the most accurate social document of this decade, right down to creating a plu-perfect student room, stocked with the right records, the right clothes (you know, the whole world wears workshirts). It is a frantic attempt to mask the fradulence of the film with the suffocating correctness of trivia.

The director has come to the silver screen, which he bloodies considerably, from television commercials. He claims he likes to do commercials because everything happens quickly and providing him with a good chance for split images, slow-motion, and whatever else comes from the manual. The film is not completely vapid. The bust at the end is in part a frightening, sickening exercise in Hollywood gore, but is enacted in the most immediate terms possible. There is little dialogue here, the camera keeps to itself, and the sheer terror of cops battling students inevitably leaves the audience shaken, even if they are all stoned and still in high school.

The story itself is a highly romanticized recount of a strike and bust at a place called Western, but it is understood that the location is Columbia. Horovitz, of course, got the idea for the movie from James Kunen's book about the Columbia Strike. He went on to construct his own fanciful plot. The center of attention is a crew jock, nice boy though, who becomes "radicalized" during the strike. He endures taunts and even a bloody nose from his friends, some of whom he radicalizes in turn.

He meets a pretty young girl on assignment with the food patrol. Running with the shoping cart down these lovely San Francisco hills, they kiss, the girl's dress rises above her hips and they fall in love. All this however, is photographed through smoke, cheesecloth, and considerable confusion.

Horovitz in an interview earlier this year with the CRIMSON described the story as a slow, logical drift to anarchy. Slow? It happens in a few days. Logical? The central character is never more than the most anonymous of symbols. Through a series of idylls in amusement parks and rock numbers by Crosby, Stills and Nash and Buffy St. Marie, the romance of politics and young love continues on its rocky road. What passes for dealing with issues is a confrontation in Telegraph Tower about the Crew Team, America, and the Movement.

SUDDENLY, the plot shifts its course. The strikers occupy the gym. They sit in concentric circles singing "Give Peace a Chance." Even an inane conversation between secretaries cannot extinguish the brutality of police charging into the building, systematically beating the students and filling up the gym with tear gas. The romance turns to nightmare, and the people, even though they have been stick figures, are beaten and bloodied with anguishing realism.

This last twenty minute metee casts the opening idyll in a differentlight. The issues were meant to be unimportant; what matters most is the pain of the bust, the baptism under tear gas, and coming of age. While there is much evidence to defend this emotionalism, it becomes an escape valve for rock numbers, artsy shots, synthetic myth making, and facile evasion of issues.

It is impossible to tell what appealed to the judges at the Cannes Film Festival and prompted them to award the movie the Jury Prize. To foreign eyes, it may seem an accurate presentation of the American venacular which fascinates many French. It is particularly American insofar as it is a bogus excursion into social truth. Horovitz, who has given the director only the tiniest characterizations to build the movie on. As long as large film companies produce and sell movies such as this masquerading as honesty or confrontation, many opinions will remain romanticized, muddled, and as annoyingly cute as this film.

The mentality of the literature which has emerged from student strikes is embarrassingly low with some books written by Harvard undergraduates among the worst offenders. Analysis is simplistic, and worst of all, the emotion unconvincing. The Strawberry Statement has the dubious virtue of representing all these traits with faithful mindlessness. What else but a synthetic 5-year-old subculture can give rise to a movie which purports to deal with imediate social problems and turns into a patently false exercise in cinematic techniques borowed from sixty-second soap commercials?