The Talkies / Godlike Reason

...R ed, the third of Krzysztof Kieslowski's stunning Three Colors trilogy and Movie of the Month, has none of this timidity...

...Take Mr...

...The one thing it has going for it is an underlying sense of regret, of nostalgia for the ordinary life of men and women and work and play and meat and potatoes with which the high-intensity artificiality of the fashion world is implicitly compared...

...A retired judge," he replies blandly...

...Yet he appears to think that the news will come as a revelation to his audience...

...Altman is like the little altar boy in the poem by Hardy who, when he sees the vicar practicing the most telling effects of his sermon beforea mirror, loses all his respect and admiration for him...

...Ooh...

...The experience of being a woman turns an austere control freak into a warm and loving human being, and masculinity is, as usual, alternately trivialized and demonized...

...they say...

...It is the beautiful people themselves whom the Altmanian anti-satire is designed not to embarrass and offend but to make even more self-satisfied...

...She also had a deep-laid plot to get rid of Tom—not by taking the obvious step of firing him but by (4) sabotaging the company's product and endangering a crucial merger, not to say the company's very survival, so that he will get the blame and be sacked for incompetence by the big boss (Donald Sutherland) who at times (5) appears to be in on the plot himself...

...Inexplicably, having invited Valentine to turn him in to the authorities and been refused, the judge turns himself in...

...Sure He that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To lust in us unused...

...But even the beasts are identifiable by sex...

...Emma Thompson is the klutzy boyfriend...

...But although his electronic gear is taken away from him, he seems to retain his omniscience...

...Just as all the stars wanted to do cameos in The Player, so all the fashion designers seem to have wanted to do cameos here...

...On the contrary, its boldness dares the perils of glibness and moralism to explore the revolutionary possibility that the world might actually make some kind of sense...

...I think the reason is that his true audience is as ignorant as he is...

...she asks, suddenly frightened of him for the first time...

...Certainly by putting the girl in the boy's place and the boy in the girl's, the film stresses their interchangeability, and the applicability of the same rules to both sexes appears actually to amount to belief in the preposterous idea of "relating to each other as pure consciousness...

...Likewise Altman has never been able to get over the discovery that people's behavior does not naturally and invariably arise from the wellspring of authenticity...

...Yes...

...This ridiculous deus ex machina is introduced something like two-thirds of the way through the film, in order that the tiresome business about sexual harassment can be dropped and the new theme of corporate skullduggery in the computer industry introduced...

...Maybe you are the woman I never met," he says teasingly...

...It's like drawing a mustache on the cover girl...

...But he seems to know of the astonishing coincidence that will bring Valentine and Auguste together...

...Hear him complain about morning sickness, cramps, and sore nipples, and say female-type things like "I hate my body...

...Is it possible that our comings and our goings can be so ordered when they seem so haphazard...

...When Meredith tells Tom how absurd it is that men always have to pretend to know and that they can't admit ignorance (with no apologies to Deborah Tannen or "difference feminism"), and Tom goes into a meeting at which she takes him apart for admitting ignorance, it looks like a savage attack on the new feminist thought for being nothing but cover for an otherwise naked grab for power...

...As in Twins, Danny DeVito is the sidekick, but this time he is an unappreciative and insensitive husband to Amold's clingy wife, begging him to "Take me with you" and then complainJames Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...She sees what he is doing and expresses her disgust with it, but at the same time she is drawn to him and the aura of godlike power that comes with knowing everyone's secrets...

...0 The American Spectator February 1995 63...

...F or Meredith was not just sexually frustrated, you see...

...Into his life, by chance, comes Valentine (Irene Jacob), a young model who has accidentally run over and injured his dog with her car...

...Like all the greatest artists, Kieslowski convinces us for a moment that it is—and that we do, after all, partake of that godlike reason that Hamlet counterpoises to the sleep of the beasts...

...There isn't a joke in the whole movie, but the movie as a whole is a joke—and already an old joke before we are well into the third reel...

...But, then, the combination of Michael (Falling Down) Douglas and Michael (Rising Sun) Crichton was bound to produce at least the whiff of a cinematic populism, which I find remarkably unattractive...

...He collects the rocks and keeps them on the piano...

...We're so-o-o naughty...

...This is the latest example of Altman's habit of taking as his subject some crowd of narcissists—army field surgeons or the country music industry or the Hollywood film industry or, now, the fashion industry—and making a movie that purports to expose and ridicule their narcissism...

...Men and women are interchangeable social units with slightly different physical characteristics...

...Who but Altman didn't know already that people in the fashion business are often attractive but superficial, glitzy, plastic, promiscuous, and phony...

...In the midst of all this randomness and complexity sits Jean-Louis Trintignant, a retired judge in Genevawho passes the time by eavesdropping, with the help of some sophisticated electronic equipment, on his neighbors' telephone conversations...

...Junior is a part of the ongoing Hollywood project to chronicle not the world that most of us know and live in, but a kind of alongside world that looks like it but is in fact as remote as if it were on some other planet...

...On the other hand, at times this seems part of the film's studied irony...

...ing that "I have nothing to wear...

...Altman is almost ashamed of the comparison—hence the toothlessness of the satire—but beneath the surface to which he confines himself, he at least understands Hamlet's question and in unguarded moments wonders, too, if all this sleeping and feeding quite adds up to humanity...

...They know the intellectual perils of their own radicalism and even poke fun at themselves for it...

...Soon we see the parallels between his life and that of Auguste, the student, and between Valentine and the woman he once loved and lost...

...They've already lost me at that point, but it gets worse...

...But talk about your high concept...

...Foreign essays in cinematic hermaphroditism like The Crying Game or La Femme Nikita at least have the virtue of self-awareness...

...But the genuine Hollywood article, untinged by Euro-irony, is in deadly earnest, as we learned in the ludicrous Hollywood remake of La Femme Nikita called Point of No Return...

...The more obvious ancestor of Junior, however, is Tootsie, whose heavy-handed moralizing is here reproduced...

...Here I know better than in the courtroom...

...Now there's a situation which, though rare, just might be believable—if, that is, it weren't for the number of unbelievable things we are asked to swallow along with it...

...When I was a judge," he tells her, "I didn't know whether I was on the good side or the bad side...

...It is a criminal act to spy on the neighbors—who include a heroin dealer, a cheating husband, and a young law student, Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), whose girlfriend is cheating on him...

...In a breathtaking opening sequence, he uses the telephone wires and cables running between two lovers, one in London and the other in Geneva, to suggest the infinite convolutions of the pathways by which we come to each other...

...Kieslowski sets up his world to stress randomness and chance and the tenuousness of people's connections with one another...

...H =let's question has lost some of its urgency in our century...

...The image is irresistible of a God retired from Judgment—of knowing everything but not being able to do anything about anything...

...0 r so we think until we begin to know as much as the judge knows...

...Now, of course, narcissists by definition like nothing better than to be exposed, so they all crowd around and beg to be in the film and tell Altman what a genius he is for exposing their outrageousness...

...Luckily for Tom, however, (6) he finds out what is afoot and is able to stop it because, fiendishly clever though she otherwise il, Meredith has forgotten about the backup files in Malaysia on which the whole plot is carefully recorded and incriminating evidence left...

...And they love it...

...And all the way through the film the beepings of telephones and answering machines remind us of this...

...To wit: (1) a top corporate executive who looks like Demi Moore and (2) a top corporate executive who looks like Demi Moore who attempts to use her power to force a subordinate male to have sex with her...

...The hero gets out of this seemingly ungetoutable jam because (3) he was leaving a message on somebody's answering machine when the gal jumped him, so the whole thing is on tape...

...In the vast universe of random occurrences, a pattern emerges, and it portends love...

...Who are you...

...He predicts Valentine's future—a happy future—from his dreams...

...The neighbors throw rocks through his windows...

...And the most salient feature about this virtual reality is that it is a place where sex is an irrelevancy...

...Meanwhile the alleged satire amounts to little more than the dog poop fouling the shoes of the beautiful people...

...Watch him cry at a soppy Kodak commercial...

...We are outrageous, aren't we...

...Why is he always the last to know...

...Like The Player, Pret-a-Porter is a kind of home movie for the industry it purports to satirize...

...Such, at any rate, is the hypothesis on which Michael Crichton and Barry Levinson would sell us in Disclosure...

...j ust as a man is as capable as a woman in Hollywood's virtual reality of having babies, so he is as capable as a woman of being sexually harassed...

...The top corporate executive, Meredith Johnson, accuses the malesubordinate, Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas) of having harassed her and the poor guy is caught having to deny her charge by asserting (2) above, which, as we have already noted, is patently unbelievable...

...This is not just virtual reality but what Janet Maslin calls "virtual comedy...

...Is it possible that our lives are such a miracle...

...Macho himself, the pneumatic Arnold Schwarzenegger, and pretend he's pregnant...

...We see no shame to our humanity in emulation of the beasts that die...

...Ivan Reitman's Junior also asks what is a man—and then provides a typical Hollywood answer: man in his essence is a hermaphrodite...

...See Arnold in drag...

...N or do I like the smell of the dog poop that keeps popping up in Robert Altman's anti-satire Pret-a-Porter, or Ready to Wear as it has now been re-titled in deference to people who are afraid of foreign languages...

...Now what (4) through (6) have to do with the reverse sexual-harassment idea is anyone's guess, but maybe we are meant to take a hint from a speech given by Meredith, in which she looks forward to the time when advances in computer technology will render race and gender obsolete and "we can relate to each other 62 The American Spectator February 1995 as pure consciousness...

...We are not so sure...

...Juvenile stuff...