The Talkies/Looking for a Good Time?
Bowman, James
Some might say the Shawn-examined life is not worth listening to. He tells of visiting a "revolutionary country," probably Nicaragua. There are many soldiers but they look like "shepherds in...
...But old cars, hats, and stockings that tie with ribbons were not enough to make these people seem innocent again...
...Then, earlier this year, The Sheltering Sky, by Bertolucci, tried a different sort of exoticism and decadence by whisking Debra Winger and John Malkovich off to North Africa where, after Malkovich expired horribly from typhus (or was it cholera...
...After a quick annulment and Baldwin's apparent reconciliation with fiancee number one, the two meet again and marry again, this time driven only by internal compulsions...
...As a Las Vegas club singer and the mistress of Bugsy Siegel (Armande Assante), she exerts an irresistible attraction over a rich playboy (Alec Baldwin) who is about to be married but who plunges into a quick affair with her in spite of the danger...
...Instead, Simon puts his go-kart engine into a 1950s-vintage, cast-iron sedan that it just can't pull...
...Here is no yuppie pepper-upper, though it is made to look like one by recombining elements of the recent representativesof the genre—the decadence of Henry and June, the exoticism of Sheltering Sky, and the artistic pretension of Cook, Thief Wife, Lover...
...An all-the-way decent one would, I suppose, be a contradiction in terms...
...It is a more intelligent film than Cook, Thief etc., which deals with very "A great work of scholarship which goes down as smoothly as an oyster...
...That there is still an audience for someone who can get the balance right appears from the interest that has been aroused, at least initially, in a string of recent films...
...How charming...
...Afterwards he can go out on the town with Griffin Dunne, Carey Lowell, and that other woman who kissed him before the show...
...Then all of them (except the man in the cardboard box) can take a cab to a "fancy restaurant...
...This is no more impressive as theology than Hollywood sentimentalism generally is, but it has much more than the usual dramatic potential because the judgment of Judgment City is based on confronting again the worst fears of your life...
...Greenaway anticipated the achievement of Bret Easton Ellis in making the most appalling sorts of behavior boring...
...But this movie has serious problems—and problems with seriousness...
...The village mores and customs of Ju Dou are simply given, and they provide a corresponding set of artistic limitations that produce a lot more emotional bang for your buck than anything I've seen for a long time...
...The film ends with a gratuitous murder, suggesting fashionable despair at the prospect of what we used to think of as normal erotic relationships...
...Maybe they'll even give him a little present...
...Either the farce or the philoslosophy might have worked separately, but together they produce only slow-paced comedy caught up less in meaningfulness than in pretentiousness...
...Brigid Brophy once said that "Courage is the only virtue," and Brooks's afterlife seems to be based upon the same premise...
...Funny idea...
...Baldwin has to go back to Boston to look after his father's toothpaste business...
...He is a latent homosexual who, naturally, goes in for gay-bashing...
...When Bugsy catches Baldwin and Miss Basinger together, he decides to amuse himself by forcing them to marry instead of killing them...
...Natasha Richardson wasn't pretty enough, Rupert Everett was too pretty, the photography, costumes, and sets by James Bowman were too slick and self-indulgent, and the Pinterian dialogue appealed, as always, to the audience's sense of abstraction rather than empathy—something which is, of course, as fatal to your artistic aphrodisiac as it is to any other kind...
...It's strong stuff, as the pornographers would say...
...Simon shoulda stuck to comedy, as one of Alec Baldwin's hangers-on would say...
...Phooey...
...I know you forgive me...
...That these films did not fare especially well at the box office suggests that a lot of people shared my disappointment in them...
...Certainly, I expected a sensual stimulant when I found the second bargain matinee sold out and had to squeeze into the early evening show...
...Here, instead of having the recently deceased come back from the grave for a bit of ectoplasmic intercourse with the bereaved, both the lovers (Brooks himself and Meryl Streep) are dead people...
...He thinks about giving beggars and bums not just some but all of his money...
...After the manner of his late work, he offers us characterization and depth and meaning and philosophical reflection on the nature of love and sexual attraction for all the world as if he were a more jolly version of Harold Pinter...
...For the nearest thing to genuine erot- ic experience currently to be found on the silver screen we have to look to—of all places—China...
...yet the effete English couple (Richardson and Everett) find their love life mysteriously revitalized by contact with them...
...In the 1960s Bernstein threw a party for the Black Panthers and at least met them...
...Yet Brooks, with the help of Torn's lawyerly evasions, is as unwilling to face them in the afterlife as he was in this...
...This is a misrepresentation...
...But when he loses all his money the strain is too much and they part again until . . . Let's see, is that three times or four...
...Anita Brookner, The Observer "[Cranston] achieves the miracle of dealing with Rousseau calmly and judiciously...
...I have nothing against philosophical mass and gravity, but in a work of art you've got to have something (usually a story) to keep all that weight on the move, and this story, with its multiple coincidences and farcical business, is not powerful enough to do that...
...The plot is pure farce...
...On the contrary, she falls into a soppy relationship with a nice supermarket checkout boy (Jean-Hugues Anglade) as a way of getting over a crush on her tough mentor in the secret service (Tcheky Karyo...
...After they divorce, Baldwin meets and marries her again...
...Some things are worth risking your life for," he says, and a lot of other poor male saps will know what he means...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991...
...John Weightman, The Sunday Independent Cloth $32.50 Illus...
...In the 1990s Shawn prefers to imagine what it would be like to have dinner at a poor person's house: the "sticky smell," TV always on, tasteless decor, greasy meat, children "sneezing and coughing...
...He and his wife (Helen Mirren again, this time with all her clothes on) are childless, but he has permanently crippled her by the violence of his lovemaking...
...Those mixed marriages never work...
...They're his friends...
...Not even...
...There the soldiers wear "strange expressions...
...Outside the theater he can give money to a person living in a cardboard box...
...Then he travels to a neighboring poor country that sounds a lot like El Salvador...
...H ere is the new femme—even more alarmingly fatale for the nineties...
...Together they are a metaphor for patriarchy gone rotten and perverse...
...It does not generate enough dramatic force to overcome our naive belief, with Andrew Marvell, that "The grave's a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace...
...What a waste of Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren...
...If you are a faulty part you must be reincarnated on earth and try again to get it right...
...If you are ready to give up on the fatal woman, you might want to give a try to woman (and man) as fatality...
...This is disappointing, but it does give Besson a chance to highlight in a couple of touching vignettes the painful split between ruthless efficiency and a more vulnerable and un-Moreauvian femininity—a split that even a lot of non-gun-toting gals know something about...
...Henry and June at least had no ideological axe to grind and tried to make use of period detail (1930s Paris) to recapture the exciteJames Bowman, TAS 's movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...He doesn't do it because that would make him, well, poor...
...Once again, I was disappointed...
...That's why we need the contrived limitations of individual psychoses or the arcane world of spies and assassins in order to reconstruct for ourselves an alternative to the mere banality of "relationships...
...This country is not charming...
...But the erotic art-house picture of yesteryear, in which the characters were at least close to believable and sex scenes excited the imagination without an excess of gynecological detail to kill it, seems to have gone the way of ballroom dancing...
...Miss Winger's sexual awakening in the arms of a swarthy and polygamous camel driver was too conveniently primitivist to be remotely believable...
...It is set in Venice and all the clothes are by Giorgio Armani, so it is plausibly billed as an erotic adventure...
...And quite indecent ones—i.e., straightforward pornography—are similarly self-subversive: their grossness overwhelms their capacity for titillation...
...Also in keeping with the Californian ambiance, it is a very non-judgmental judgment—more like quality control, really...
...Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou combines breathtaking photography (what an inspired idea to set this romance in a silk-dyeing factory) with an immediately engaging, down-to-The Good-Earth love story that excites the imagination without either Armani clothes or anyone's taking them off...
...once you do, you go on to some unspecified but no doubt very important career as a widget in the great machine...
...The preposterousness of casting the exquisite gamine, Anne Parillaud, as a vicious cop-killer reprogrammed to be a deadly efficient secret agent is oddly made more tolerable by the compounded preposterousness of having instruction in femininity alternate with instruction in martial arts...
...I guess they must feel like the boy in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying who said that he was handing out feminist tracts because it was "a good way to get laid," but it makes it awfully hard on the rest of us who have more of an appetite for art than for ideology...
...ment of novelty in a series of sexual adventures that look pretty tame by the standards of more recent art...
...Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life offers a new and welcome variation on the lately popular Hollywood theme of ghost-lusting...
...Here, too, sex is dangerous but in the way it is for most of us—i.e., without sharp knives or high-caliber firearms...
...University of Chicago Press At bookstores or for VISA/MC orders call: 1-800-621-2736 In Illinois: 312-568-1550 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 33 much the same subject: the relationship between patriarchy and sexuality...
...Basinger doesn't like Boston and leaves him...
...Whose house is this, Bob Cratchit's...
...Yet the movie-makers keep trying...
...Patriarchy is as sinister here as it is in The Comfort of Strangers, but the film's approach to it is non-ideological (could it be that Chinese artists, unlike our own, have had quite enough of that kind of thing...
...Danger lies instead, as it does in almost all of the greatest love stories, in the conflict between private passion and public responsibility...
...Shawn's condescension towards the "poor," a category encompassing everyone who doesn't attend the theater regularly and can't afford to shop at Balducci's, is matched only by his intense fear of becoming one of them...
...Here patriarchy is represented by Christopher Walken, who responds to everything that he sees about him in Venice with an anecdote about his dead father—a big, strong man with a black mustache that he used to touch up with mascara...
...Do you suppose these high-brow types will ever get over their obsession with feminism...
...Here is narcissism grown sick of itself and blaming normal sex...
...Like Truffaut thirty years ago, Besson recognizes the sense of danger that always attaches to Mlle...
...It is an illustration of what happens when you try to put the engine of light comedy into a body of heavy thought: you get an underpowered film...
...The people gathered here tonight will forgive him...
...The icecream there, he says, is not good...
...All of these films, which I went to see in previews or on opening day, were packed with eager, mostly middle-aged people, many of them in couples, looking to refire their jaded imaginations with fresh images of the magic of sexual discovery...
...The latest appeal to the cloyed carnality of an audience in whose company I am so often surprised to fmd myself was Paul Schrader's Comfort of Strangers, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter based on a novel by Ian McEwan...
...First there was Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, whose title promised a soap opera-like complexity of relationships but which was, in fact, just an excuse for a tract on how power pathology and sex pathology feed into one another...
...But that kind of funny idea needs simple characters, fast pacing, sharp timing, and a framework of meaning that is as light as a go-kart...
...Anthony Burgess, The Independent MAURICE CRANSTON The Noble Savage JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU • 1754-1762 "What this second volume so excellently does is to extend our knowledge of Rousseau as a thinker, even a logician, while dealing impassively with those impulses which weakened the generally heroic cast of his thought...
...H as Wally Shawn appointed him- self the Leonard Bernstein of the 1990s...
...Those of us with a certain nostalgia for the old one approached Jerry Rees's film of Neil Simon's screenplay for The Marrying Man with high hopes for the performance of the sultry Kim Basinger, who looks almost as dangerous, if not quite so subtle, as Jeanne Moreau...
...Brooks has some funny ideas and some funny lines, but his film does not please as an artistic whole...
...That is what she is supposed to be, anyway...
...Here the social limitations upon individual feeling are taken for granted in a way that perhaps they never can be again in Western art...
...He stays at an "eccentric, expensive" hotel where he is served delicious ice cream...
...And, in several of the vignettes from the past that he is forced to re-experience, it is hard to see what fear has to do with them at all: his mistakes, awkwardness-es, pratfalls may garner a few easy laughs, but he leaves untouched whole fields of emotional energy...
...THE TALKIES LOOKING FOR A GOOD TIME...
...His careful rereading of the vast store of original documents presents Rousseau beautifully in the round, and leaves him just as extraordinary as ever...
...Sexual roles have become too confused, and the mirror symbolism of the ending as well as the fashion-plate photography throughout evoke instead mere reflexivity of passion...
...Yet we are never shownthat her pupil can wield female sexuality with the handiness that she does the enormous, phallic weapons she is constantly being given—in order that she may blow away the enemies of retat...
...W by can't anyone make a halfway decent erotic movie anymore...
...Which of us cannot understand these powerful and elemental feelings...
...Moreau's attractiveness, even in age, and he tries to tease this out by having her say to the certifiable man-killer: "Remember that two things have no limit: femininity and the means of taking advantage of it...
...In fact, courage is not a virtue at all, but the precondition of all virtue (and a lot of vice too, as Alec Baldwin discovers...
...The erotic scenes were so bizarrely contrived for symbolic purposes that they repelled rather than invited imaginative self-identification of audience with characters...
...Their green uniforms look like "pajamas...
...It is the glorious Jeanne Moreau who undertakes the former...
...In reality, she would have been too busy killing lice to have enjoyed anything more sensual than a hot bath...
...In dramatic/cinematic terms, however, it is a virtue to concentrate on the starkly emotional issue of facing up to one's fears...
...There are many soldiers but they look like "shepherds in Renaissance paintings...
...The two meet and fall in love in Judgment City, which is meant to look like Southern California without smog or stress, crime or cholesterol—right down to the screening rooms in which people have to review their lives and submit to judgment...
...S ex-role confusion is also the theme of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, a French version of recent American super-cop movies...
...The love story, too, is superficial and unengaging in itself and only provides an opportunity for belated bravery...
...Even the comic setups like the "Past Lives Pavilion," where the hostess is Shirley MacLaine, the Judgment City nightclub where the comic's act is deader than the dead audience, and the running joke about brain capacity are not exploited to the full...
...Watching this on the blue-movie channel in your hotel room would be like turning on the gondola races...
...In the first of Brooks's film clips from his past, for example, he must relive the 11-yearold's terror of a playground bully and—much worse—shame of having backeddown from a fight with him...
...and therefore tragic rather than nihilistic...
...Anyway, they marry each other four times...
...Having gone on remaking American films noirs of the 1940s (which they first identified and named) for forty years, the French are now ready to start knocking off another American model, it seems: Robocop meets Moulin Rouge...
...Here the cop is not a super-machine but a super-woman—built more on the lines of Audrey Hepburn than of Linda Carter...
...This is more satisfying...
...Walken has an exaggerated respect for patriarchy, without the strength to carry it on in an uncongenial age...
...Hence the Guilt, as he pleads towards the end of The Fever,"Forgive me...
...Forgive me...
...NOW IN PAPERBACK Jean-Jacques The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1754 $17.95 Illus...
...Brooks's defender (Rip Torn) tells him that the universe is like a machine and will break down if it has faulty parts...
Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
