The Talkies/Uranians
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES URANIANS Afew years ago in England there was something called a "Martian school" of poetry. It took its name from Craig Raine's poem, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," whose idea was...
...A pretty story...
...The acting in this picture, especially that of Philippe Noiret as Watrin and Gerard Depardieu as Leopold, is overwhelmingly good...
...But too often it is nothing more—a cut-rate version of the shock of recognition that great art gives us with more power and less contriving...
...A homosexual couple are there to show that gays are more successful at "relationships" than most of the heteros in the film and the ugly specter of domestic violence is raised on several occasions as a way of explaining why...
...Times two...
...Even Craig Raine cracks a subtle if not very funny joke about it by making the machine a telephone...
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...Thus the evil space-bug in The Borrower, for all its interchangeable heads, is just a classic cinematic bad guy...
...Morning liberates him with a sense of rebirth into the earth, a planet full of flowers and rivers and people...
...Because the school has been bombed, the schoolmaster, Monsieur Watrin, conducts his lessons in the tavern, and the uneducated Leopold listens in, enthralled by another new world—that of poetry, which is opened up to him by his first taste of Racine...
...Of course it fails, because it doesn't see the world as the rest of us do...
...Late for Dinner has its heroes frozen by a doctor of cryogenics called Dr...
...There is one great line, however: "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen all at once, Willie...
...Why would someone go to such trouble to pretend to be someone else only to invent a third identity when he decided, for reasons that are altogether obscure, to turn crooked...
...He goes gunning for Goldie when she discovers his secret...
...Apart from being a creative casting device—since the same character is played by a succession of different actors, each with a jagged ring-aroundthe-collar where his head is supposed to have been stuck on—this implies your basic Hollywood Cartesianism...
...Only Watrin somehow remains above it all, gifted with "benevolent indifference" to the fears and suspicions of the rest of the town...
...In the former, a cute kid reunites a couple driven apart by grief for a dead son...
...All the way THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 37 through, such jokes act as flares to make the shadows of classic horror-film evil—insidious, deceptive, violent, unstoppable, and possessing its unwilling victims--more grotesque and absurd...
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...In both Paradise and the 'Terence McNally/ Garry Marshall film Frankie and Johnnie the fresh start, the revitalization of a tired old world, is so sticky-sweet that I cannot digest it, I am afraid...
...But you can't help thinking that a chance has been missed...
...Women are abused by men and so "relationships" don't form and so there are a lot of lonely people out there...
...Hogan so awful that I wondered if this was part of the alien effect: nothing in the movie looked genuinely human...
...linalierhfills 41.4,c44to 139 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991...
...Hence Raine's description of a telephone: In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up...
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...By that I mean that Descartes's soul/body dualism—the famous "ghost in a machine" —is a useful assumption for horror and sci-fi yarn-spinners...
...Last summer's hit, Regarding Henry, used the more conventional Martian technique of amnesia to give Harrison Ford a fresh pair of eyes with which to look at the world—alas, to nothing more than a sentimental end...
...More traditional Martian artists, like the authors of "Star Trek," make their anthropoid machines as bizarre aspossible while the ghosts talk and act like late-twentieth-century Americans...
...Frankie and Johnnie is less saccharine but quite as preachy and much more PC...
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...E asier said than done...
...Leopold's refusal to compromise and dissemble dooms him in this milieu...
...I thought at first that Wolfgang Petersen's Shattered was up to the same thing until a stunning reversal at the end taught the hero that the former life he was still in the process of rediscovering was not so wonderful after all...
...For a while the deception is successful, partly because suspicion is diverted towards Leopold the tavern-keeper, who himself had engaged in some shadydealings with the Germans...
...He begins to fancy himself a poet and composes execrable but at the same time delightfully wacky alexandrines...
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...If you wanted to be charitable you could say the same about two of the movies' favorite methods of making it new: aliens and amnesiacs...
...How beautiful it is...
...Though he is finally done in by a temporary alliance between the Communists and an ex-collaborator whose money has kept him out of trouble, he stands for a rough honesty and decency and hope in the midst of allbut-universal corruption and cowardice...
...The Communists are in the political ascendancy and ruthlessly hunting down and executing former collaborators with the Nazi regime...
...Placed inside a humanoid body whose head has an alarming tendency to explode, he must borrow other people's heads, much to the other people's dismay, every time this happens...
...We spend our lives, says Al, the Hollywood Cartesian, "trapped inside this body without bumping into people trapped inside other bodies...
...The central premise is not very convincing...
...Alienness comes James Bowman, the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is The American Spectator's movie critic...
...One or two jokes about how prices have gone up and how the pop music on the radio must have been set at the wrong speed are about it...
...fying as well as uplifting...
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...If you prefer, mail check or card authorization and expiration...
...But the high-tech warrior with his redundant muscles has really nothing to do but beat up a couple of other intergalactic plug-uglies...
...And, just to add to the heart-warming qualityof Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith's final clinch in the rain, there is another cute kid, her funny-waitress mama, a scary neighbor lady who turns out to be nice, and A Message, hammered home again and again, about how you have to confront your fears...
...Add shipping/insurance: $3.50 for one, $10.50 for three...
...By the end, when it assumes the head of a vicious rapist, its extraterrestrial provenance seems almost incidental...
...In the single most riveting performance of the film, he tells the story of how he had been reading about the planet Uranus, that dark and icy star hurtling into the void, at 11:15 on the night when the bomb fell that destroyed his house and also killed his wife in the arms of her lover...
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...Suffice it to say that someone someone thought he knew turned out not to be that someone at all, but someone else...
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...Now, every night at 11:15 he feels upon his heart the terrible weight of Uranus, a "cosmic anguish...
...The strangeness of the familiar can be terriFOR FASTEST SERVICE, ORDER TOLL FREE (800) 882-3050 24 hours a day, 7 days a week Please give order #14299063...
...W e see the same thing again in John McNaughton's The Borrower, wherein giant bugs from outer space look like Laurence Olivier compared to the human creatures, among whom one of the bugs, a convict transported for his crimes to our own "savage and primitive planet," is condemned to live...
...we've gotta connect...
...I suppose we should be grateful that Al Pacino is allowed to coax Michelle Pfeiffer out of "that secret place" inside herself "where no one can find you," but it all looks a little too easy to me...
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...I can't tell you much about this film if I am not to give away the secret of its climax...
...But if you like this sort of thing, this, as they say, is the sort of thing you will like...
...Chilblains in 1962...
...Don't worry, wives: your husbands are probably not murderous bigamists with links to international art-theft and forgery rings...
...In Suburban Commando, for instance, it was a potentially interesting idea to cast Hulk Hogan, an obvious caveman type, as the supposedly sophisticated alien life form...
...At one point, the second incarnation of the monster (Tom Towles) sits in a soup kitchen full of tramps when one of them drops a dead mouse in his soup...
...Instead there is a love story—about how the still-young husband still loves his now-aged wife...
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...Here the script is so lame and the acting of Mr...
...More commonly in our sentimental age, however, Martian techniques are used to remind jaded folk what a wonderful world it is...
...down to a temporary puzzlement over car alarms and skateboards...
...It is only such a perspective beyond the Martian—Uranian, in fact —and not simple moral nostrums that allows us the balm of comfort for the pain of our own futility and powerlessness...
...In general, bad acting can provide a homey artificiality as counterpoint to the exotic artificiality of technological romance...
...The same thing happens in Damian Harris's Deceived, in which Goldie Hawn's nice husband (John Heard) turns out to be a murderer and a crook who has assumed the identity of a dead schoolmate...
...And, of course, you can bid your messy and ineffective rabbit ears, loop, rod, or dish antennas good-bye...
...Archambaud, in spite of the danger to himself and his family from the Communist on the premises and his own innate cynicism ("The only thing that counts in life," he tells his daughter, "is money"), agrees to hide him...
...When they come back in 1991, there is little exploitation of the device's potential for seeing anew...
...A stunningly impressive look at France in 1945, just after the German occupation, it shows us a world where suspicion, mistrust, vengefulness, betrayal, and hypocrisy are inescapable—the stuff of everyday life for ordinary people, who are isolated and divided from each other by their fear...
...What is striking is how little use they seem to make of such contrivances...
...Human wars, concentration camps, and justice alike are just "pranks...
...We need daytime phone number for all orders and issuing bank for charge orders...
...Why go to church when you have the movies...
...Archambaud (Jean-Pierre Marielle), and his family share their house with a schoolmaster and a Communist (Michel Blanc) and his family...
...Yet a lot of the film is interesting because of the Martian humor of this groby James Bowman tesque creature with the Frankenstein walk trying to act like a human being...
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...He, however, hasn't the wit or the hypocrisy to conceal it—or his loathing for the Communists...
...But it is good to be reminded that looking at familiar things with fresh eyes is not only educative and uplifting but a symptom of paranoia...
...If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds...
...Still, at least it aims to produce a kind of artistic experience...
...Or so we discover in the film of the month, Claude Berri's Uranus...
...Mary Agnes Donoghue wrote the screenplay for Deceived as well as for Paradise, which she also directed...
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...From such a distance he sees that nothing in man is evil...
...Everyone is afraid...
...If it is desirable to "connect" there is a lot more that prevents it than sad or painful memories...
...It took its name from Craig Raine's poem, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," whose idea was to describe the familiar as if it were being seen for the first time...
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...And yet they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger...
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...Watrin is like Chaucer's Troilus, who, at the end of the greatest narrative poem in the language, ascends to the eighth sphere (approximately the site of present-day Uranus) and laughs at "This litel spot of erthe, that with the sea embraced is...
...It is so completely plot-driven that the suspense is almost all it has...
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...Take that, Dr...
...When the town's prisoners of war return from Germany, one of them is picked out and beaten up for collaborating and none of his friends tries to help him...
...Einstein...
...They are especially eager to find Maxime Loin (Gerard Desarthe), a journalist and editor of a pro-German newspaper, who turns up on Archambaud's doorstep, asking him for a place to hide...
...Come to think of it, that's Hulk Hogan's Message too...
...Archambaud's wife betrays him with Maxime Loin, while the live-in Communist finally discovers Loin only because of his attempt to seduce Archambaud's daughter...
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...The New York Times critic calls him "irresponsibly naive" for this, but she misses the point...
...Not knowing any better, he crunches it down without missing a bite...
...He feels like the first man in the first garden...
...Our body-machines are not just vehicles for ghosts that flit from one to another by means of futuristic technology, the black arts or even love...
...No one trusts anyone else...
Vol. 24 • December 1991 • No. 12
