Movies: La Dolce Venezio

An English-Polynesian starlet named Laya Raki tore off her bikini top for photographers at the Venice Film Festival last week, but that was mostly because she was only an English-Polynesian starlet named Laya Raki and it was the Venice Film Festival.

That sort of headline hugging makes it tough on the average starlet who is eager enough for the spotlight but doesn’t care to go quite that far to attract it. And so Tanya Lopert, girl starlet and daughter of a United Artists vice president, had to be content with something less spectacular but considerably more ladylike. With Daddy in tow, Tanya made her big entrance at a party at the Palazzo Ca’ Rezzonico, dressed in a spangled magenta mini-gown slit to the thigh.

The occasion seemed to be all Tanya’s when what to the wandering eye should appear but an ex-stripper named Rita Renoir in an openwork crocheted gown under which she wore only a nostalgic G string. Worse yet, Princess Virginie-CarolineThérèse-Pancracie-Galdine von Furstenburg, known to her friends as Ira, was in Venice in her new guise as actress. That threw Tanya into a snit. Ira, she complained, was “taking work away from girls who need it.” Tanya finally called a press conference to explain everything, but she called it for the same hour that just about everybody was elsewhere attending an old Greta Garbo movie.

Different Morals. If Tanya botched her week in Venice, she certainly didn’t do any worse than the producers and directors who supplied movies to the competition. Of the 14 films entered in the festival, only Sweden’s Night Games, Britain’s Fahrenheit 451 and a joint Italian-Algerian production of The Battle of Algeria elicited any serious critical approval.

The reception of Night Games was roiled by turbulence over its moral quotient. Directed by Sweden’s Mai Zet-terling, the film is an eerie story of a mother-and-son’s investigation of every forbidden game: masturbation, incest, sodomy, necrophilia, golf. It was shown only to the press and the festival jury, but Venice’s Giovanni Cardinal Urbani felt obliged “again this year to express moral reserve.” Retorted Director Zetterling, a 41-year-old former actress who learned her trade from Ingmar Bergman: “Censorship is such a highly complex affair. Things of violence, war, crimes—in Sweden this is the only thing we cut. But in another country, there are different moral values.”

The Battle of Algeria, Gillo Pontecorvo’s earnest, overlong semi-documentary about the bitter struggle for Algerian independence, impressed the judges so much that they awarded it the festival’s Gold Lion, even as it outraged the touchy French. Fahrenheit 451 earned quieter but more general appreciation. Directed by France’s gifted Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim) and blessed by the presence in the leads of Julie Christie and Oskar Werner, Fahrenheit is a Ray Bradbury story that takes a disturbing look at a future world in which the printed word is forbidden and every last book is burned. (The temperature of the title is that at which “a book catches fire and turns to ashes.”)

Only Hope. The other movies at Venice left everything in ashes without turning anything on fire. From Germany, from France, from Italy, from India, even from sentimental old Mother Russia, came long, unarguable movie testaments to the dreariness of it all. La Curée, Roger Vadim’s version of Zola’s Alexandre, impressed most critics as little more than a soap bubble around his wife Jane Fonda. The U.S., displaying more invention than intelligence, came up with Chappaqua, a booze-and-drug Upanishad displaying Allen Ginsberg, the poor man’s Whitman. The festival scene had become such a cluttered junkyard that Count Giovanni Volpi, son of the competition’s originator, disowned the whole thing with the melancholy statement: “The hopes of Venice are again deluded.”

Not all the hopes of Venice, however. There were still the parties, which may have been the only hope to begin with. Best of all was the do at the Palazzo Volpi given by Countess Nathalie Volpi di Misurata, Count Volpi’s mother. Not very many movie people got invited, of course, but the Maharajah and Maharani of Jaipur were there, and the Begum Aga Khan was there, and Gina Lollobrigida was there, and Princess von Furstenburg, and Sam Newhouse, and Mrs. Amintore Fanfani, and a number of Bourbon-Parmas, Rothschilds, Patiños, Dubonnets, D’Arenbergs, Romanoffs, Colonnas and Borgheses. It was the best film festival any of them could remember.