The Talkies: The Look of Love
Bowman, James
"The Talkies: The Look of Love" by James Bowman The Look of Love In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of phone sex, as Tennyson might say if, poor chap, he were alive today. Spike Lee's Girl 6...
...This peculiar blindness, in both its aspects, must be what led some genius of a casting director to come up with the idea of putting Sharon Stone on death row in Last Dance...
...The same cannot be said for a matched pair of prison flicks, Last Dance by Bruce Beresford and Captives by Angela Pope...
...We are all in the position of Mike Myers in Wayne's World, saying defensively and not very hopefully about our fantasies: "It could happen...
...Part of what Nelly needs from the old man depends on there being no sexual tension between them, even though the possibility of a sexual relationship is never quite ruled out...
...As Troy Aikman would say, Get Rill...
...Nelly has a brief affair with Pierre's young publisher, Vincent (Jean-Hugues Anglade), but it doesn't work out...
...I understand that people want to believe that falling in love is easy precisely because they know it is hard...
...THE TALKIES by James Bowman The Look of Love In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of phone sex, as Tennyson might say if, poor chap, he were alive today...
...Everything else has always come easily to her, so why should not beauty and sexual attractiveness as well...
...They sleep on opposite sides of the cell and discover in the morning that neither of them is really a breakfast person...
...This is not someone who is going to have her first taste of shrimp as her last meal, as Miss Stone's character does...
...E-mail him at 72056.3226 @compuserve.com...
...Of course anyone who looks like Sharon Stone but lives in a trailer park would either be terminally stupid or preternaturally determined not to take advantage of the assets God gave her...
...I feel free with you," she tells him and, more intimately, "You're a part of my life now" — just as she has become a part of his life by putting it into words for him...
...The time apart after the fire, and the abortive romance with St...
...Sarah Bernhardt couldn't have pulled that one off...
...Moreover, she is much more disciplined than Abby...
...She also represents to him the hope of all romance, at any age: a new start in life disburdened of the constraining past...
...Like her American coevals, she wants to keep him at arm's length...
...But I would like to stand up for Noelle...
...Spike Lee's Girl 6 was typically over-ambitious and has flopped badly, but Denise Calls Up by Hal Sal-wen takes a closer, more penetrating look at the electronic distances that we put between us...
...And then, as if that were not enough, add that the rich and spoiled but sympathetic young lawyer who has taken a compassionate interest in her (Rob Morrow) is allowed to spend the night before her execution with her...
...The film, by the end of its eighty minJAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...This is all wrong...
...utes, begins to look like an overly developed "Seinfeld" episode: self-consciously cute and arch rather than genuinely funny...
...least Captives, which stars Julia Ormond as a caring prison dentist and Tim Roth as the sensitive wife-murderer who loves her, puts some limit to its implausibilities...
...But in the end, he and Lucie attempt a reconciliation while he and Nelly embrace in his now empty, book-denuded study for the first and last time as they say good-bye...
...The very attractive Miss Garofalo simply puts on some pounds and takes off some makeup and, presto, she is meant to appear unattractive...
...I for one would have thought that Brian was better off with Noelle —but for the fact that he is rather a prig himself and so deserves to get stuck with Abby...
...58 June 1996 The American Spectator great virtue of having a really strong Jane is that the taint of mere sentimentality and wish-fulfillment, which the novel itself does not escape, is almost removed...
...At44 Abby is a typical intellectual in that she resents the idea that real self-discipline should apply to her...
...Possibly Hollywood directors are so insulated from the world, so surrounded by high-priced pulchritude, that they have never actually seen a genuinely unattractive woman...
...As usual, Hollywood is more or less hopeless when it comes to presenting physical unattractiveness...
...Abby is a typical intellectual in that she resents the idea that real self-discipline should apply to her...
...Pierre hires Nelly to type his memoirs for him, explaining to her in an untranslatable French phrase, that he is terrified of word processing and computers in general because they involve memoire sans souvenirs...
...John Rivers (Samuel West), are all but completely cut...
...The American Spectator • June 199 6 59...
...This cinematic updating of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel is based on the rather strained premise that all human relationships, as well as the most fundamental events of our lives, can take place over the telephone: it includes love and romance, heartbreak and disappointment, birth and death, and yet none of its protagonists ever meet until the very end...
...In fact, there is no romance, except in their respective imaginations, which might almost make this the Gallic equivalent of our wholesome American tales of phone sex...
...But that is also an example of how too much of the film is taken up with ever more ingenious plot devices designed to keep the characters apart as they nurse their improbable relationships by telephone...
...What both films have in common, however—besides being rescue fantasies and wildly improbable ones—is the problem of all cheap romance: that it makes relationships too easy...
...But it is hard to overstate her ridiculousness in the part of a neglected and abused child from a trailer park, goaded into murder while on a crack binge (and wearing a wig filched from "The Sonny and Cher Show") by the taunts of her rich and spoiled high school rival...
...Each represents to the other a missing and longed-for element in his or her life, but neither is willing to pretend that what they value so highly in each other is enough to cancel out all the things that separate them—of which the least important is the difference in their ages...
...These, I guess, can simply be taken for granted...
...By contrast, the phone-sex episode in The Truth About Cats and Dogs by Michael Lehmann almost looks natural, since it proceeds from the desperate stratagem of Abby (Janeane Garofalo), the smart-but-dumpy heroine, to prevent her hunky boyfriend, Brian (Ben Chaplin), from finding out that she doesn't really look like Uma Thurman, the beautifulbut-dumb neighbor, Noelle, whom she has persuaded to impersonate her...
...More likely, they just don't expect us to take this stuff seriously anyway...
...Naturally, it takes a French sensibility to look at romance in a genuinely grown-up, if not necessarily in a much more plausible or less wish-fulfilling, way...
...Yet the Hollywood is always looking for love in all the wrong places...
...The first is a male rescue fantasy and the second a female rescue fantasy, both involving imprisoned murderers and caring outsiders who manage to penetrate their carapace of emotional scar tissue and teach them to love again...
...The phone was embedded in her brain...
...Not only is she better looking than Abby, but she doesn't pretend to read crappy books by horrible people, like Simone de Beauvoir's letters to Jean-Paul Sartre—which is what Brian gives her to show that he is a real intellectual...
...Rochester...
...Stone fancies herself as a serious actress, and she is actually not bad so long as she is playing close to type—the femme fatale in Basic Instinct or the brassy ex-prostitute in Casino...
...My favorite is when the death of one character is recorded on an answering machine because she was talking on her car phone at the time of her fatal crash...
...Paris knows better—and yet...
...In fact, its title is Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud, and, like the earlier film, it stars Emmanuelle Beart...
...Finally, there is no serious attempt to look at the insecurities that produce such relationships in the first place...
...It is a fitting image for the forgetting that love requires of us—and for the fact that it is more than telephonic distance that may prevent us from finding love anyway...
...Claude Sautet's last film (Movie of the Month for August 1993) was called A Heart in Winter, but his latest—and this month's MOM—might as well be so called...
...The winter here is that of the retired judge, Pierre Arnaud (Michel Serrault), who as we meet him is trying to divest himself of his past in a number of different ways (writing his memoirs while selling off all his books and papers) but also falling for theyoung, 25-year-old Nelly (Mlle...
...Just as Hollywood is incapable of reality when it comes to the representation of physical unattractiveness, so it is similarly incapable with real, serious moral unattractiveness—which is what is actually found in prisons...
...Beart) who embodies two of his highest values: "flexibility" and an end to boredom...
...That is why Hal Salwen is able to satirize people's fear of intimacy in a film like Denise Calls Up...
...Tell me about it...
...If you want to see a genuine jolie laide, however, I can recommend Charlotte Gainsbourg in the title role of Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre...
...The ending is too rushed, so that we don't have the sense of the spaces in the relationship between Jane and Rochester...
...Noelle is the only one who is not trying to impress us in this way...
...And nothing happens...
...It scares us...
...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...Luckily, the object of Jane's passion is almost incidental to this gloriously operatic version of the tale, and I would have no hesitation about recommending it if one didn't have the feeling that the money ran out about two-thirds of the way through...
...We all want love," Pierre tells her, "but when we find it, we push it away...
...His own memories keep intruding in the form of phone calls from his wife, Lucie, who uses business entanglements with him as an excuse to keep nagging him even though they have been separated for twenty years...
...She is a truly remarkable-looking woman (just as she was a remarkable-looking child in The Little Thief eight years ago) and her intensity and purity of spirit, just right for the role of Jane, almost single-handedly save the film from the merely dissolute performance of William Hurt as Mr...
...Her savoring menus but refusing to eat is part of what makes her so slim and therefore so beautiful...
...I suspect that, underneath her cute and smart and funny exterior, she is an arrogant prig, destined to join a NOW chapter and start moaning about how badly treated she is within a week of landing her man...
...Instead of the volcanic passion, barely contained, of George C. Scott or the brooding romanticism of Orson Welles, both of whom have made decent screen Rochesters, Hurt can only turn his stock new age, sensitive-man, inwardly-Hurt performance up a few notches...
...There are some funny moments...
...But it defeats this purpose of romance to make it ironic (and, believe me, I would like to think that the ludicrous awfulness of Last Dance were deliberate), or to rub the audience's nose in its untruth-to-life...
...But the real absurdity lies in putting a young and attractive woman —any young and attractive woman—on death row in the first place...
Vol. 29 • June 1996 • No. 6
