The Talkies: Come Rain or Come Shine
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES by James Bowman Come Rain or Come Shine E ven the title of The Mirror Has Two Faces by Barbra Streisand is a lie. The mirror only has one face. It is she who is supposed to have...
...Here the relationship between love and suffering, even madness, is explored in the guise of a murder mystery...
...But, as it is the nineties, von Trier adds an element of kinkiness to keep his jaded audience watching...
...Her continual bargaining with God seems to sanction a series of loveless, anonymous sexual encounters to help Jan, although it gets her ostracized from her church and community and nearly institutionalized...
...Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) becomes obsessed with a woman (Kim Novak) who seemingly kills herself...
...But still, it is good for us to be reminded that love can heal as well as destroy...
...But here it is a sign of his genuine, if excessive love...
...It is the mid-1970's, and their community is beginning to open up to the world a little with the arrival of North Sea oil workers...
...Geoffrey Rush as the grown up David, a non-stop talker and smoker with a nervous detachment from reality that often produces ludicrous scenes, contributes a terrific performance, but as good if not better is Armin Mueller-Stahl as his tyrannical father, a concentration camp survivor who, having lost his whole family in the Holocaust, is determined to create a new one in defiance of God and the world...
...He is even able to walk with the help of crutches...
...Passion as a rare non-chemical high out of the designer pharmocopoeia, and with all the suffering taken out of it...
...Miss Streisand is so paranoid about her appearance that she cannot bring herself to look genuinely unattractive...
...But when Jan has to go back to his oil rig, Bess becomes frantic...
...Will you love me...
...To do this he must exercise absolute control over his family and especially his talented son...
...This, we have to understand, is California passion, or passion-lite...
...I t may be that the movies are not suited to the representation of grand and tragic passion, and that the best we can hope for them is a balance of love's destructive and constructive forces...
...Unfortunately, the second half of the film, dealing with David's career at the Royal College of Music under the tuition of John Gielgud, and his subsequent breakdown after a performance of the "monumental" Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto ("the Rack Three" as the old prof familiarly calls it), is less impressive...
...That, at any rate, is what we get in the Movie of the Month, the Australian film Shine by Scott Hicks...
...He cannot possibly continue to suppose that the kind of sex she is having is good for her...
...Your sisters will have no brother if you leave me...
...This is the based-on-fact story of David Helfgott, a brilliant young pianist who had a serious mental breakdown after being spurned by his father for trying to assert his independence...
...The notion that there is a kind of secret sanctity prepared to shed its grace on perverted sex acts is doubtless what appealed to the Cannes jury...
...Her prayer is answered...
...From this point on, Bess's primitive religious sensibility takes over...
...It would be easy to ham up a role like this, but Mueller-Stahl plays it with an understatement that makes his character the more believable...
...She doesn't want to at all, but he tells her that it will save his life...
...It is the question that haunts all women in love, although it never seems to trouble Miss Streisand, to whom it would never occur to think that her splendid self might be diminished by love...
...Bess MacNeill (Emily Watson) is a slightly simple-minded Scottish girl whose family belongs to a particularly severe Calvinist sect...
...He thinks he does, anyway, and tells her that he will die unless he can remember the sensations of physical love, so he needs her to go out and have sex with other men and tell him about it...
...The film is worth seeing for the stunning performance of Miss Watson as Bess, but there is at the heart of it an insurmountable incoherence: it never succeeds in explaining why Jan decides Bess should sleep with other men...
...The real44 It would never occur to Miss Streisand that her splendid self might be diminished by love...
...Admittedly, this is not quite as funny as the idea of Babs as a professor at Columbia, holding a packed lecture hall of undergraduates spellbound with her explication of courtly love in the Middle Ages...
...And then: "Don't go...
...After the descent into madness, we are abruptly yanked back into the real world where neither the hope of love nor the fear of heights is anything but illusory...
...The theme of vertigo—the fear of falling both literally and metaphorically into an abyss of love which is also madness—possesses the film up until its final moments when suddenly there is a bizarre Hitchcockian resolution...
...I n Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes this year, the heroine also has no doubts, but that is because she doesn't hesitate to sacrifice herself for the man she loves...
...As in some old story from the Lives of the Saints, with her death Jan experiences a miraculous recovery...
...But it is too fantastical that he should ask her to do what supposedly torments and disgusts him because it is the only way she can "get on with her life...
...You will never be anybody's son...
...In other hands, this man's insistence that he is "as proud as a father can be" of his son's talent andthat he loves him so much that he can confidently assure him that "no one will ever love you as much as your father" would be mere cant and hypocrisy, a transparent excuse for his tyrannical regime...
...There is an accident on the oil rig and Jan comes back paralyzed from the neck down...
...Thus, after the montage of diet and exercise and beauty treatments that she undertakes, like a kind of female Rocky, she ends up looking just the same except that her hair is more unkempt, and a different color, and she is now showing us those trademark Streisand legs, hitherto kept carefully bagged as a shorthand way of telling us that her character is supposed to be fat...
...Here is love with none of the true passion and suffering taken out of it, love almost in the old-fashioned hero- is and operatic style...
...Of course it is only in defying his father and taking a scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London, that David can prove his fitness—but it also breaks him...
...He has the look of the troubled teenager down pat—the boy who still wets his bed and lives in terror of his father's love...
...But in her own voice she continues to insist that she wants Jan back at any price, under any circumstances...
...Remarkably, however, Hitchcock steps back from his self-identification with the male's fear of a loss of control to represent also the female fear of a loss of identity...
...When he finds someone who, he thinks, is her double, he obsessively tries to remake her in the image of the woman he fell in love with...
...She can't bear to be apart from him...
...Do you understand me...
...She has long conversations with her stern, Calvinist God in which she chastises herself, in His voice, for her weakness and impatience...
...One of these, a fun-loving Scandinavian called Jan (Stellan Skarsgard), Bess falls in love with...
...His father tells him that "You will never come back into this house again...
...And after Bess's funeral, at which the smug elders consign her soul to hell, she works another miracle of a sort which hasn't been seen in the movies since Bing Crosby was a priest...
...It is she who is supposed to have two—the putatively dull, dowdy, plain Rose Morgan, perennial wallflower, who is selected by the Spock-like math professor, Gregory Larkin (Jeff Bridges), specifically for her unattractiveness, and the made-over Rose who knocks his eye out and makes him love her for real...
...Ultimately, she convinces herself that to be killed during a violent sex session with a sinister trawlerman (Udo Kier) is what is necessary to save him, as Jan is slipping further and further towards death...
...The teenage David is played by Noah Taylor, who was such an ornament to that splendid film of a couple of years ago called Flirting...
...Perhaps the most poignant and significant moment in the film comes when the woman says to the mad-looking Scottie, "If I let you change me, will that do it...
...Von Trier wants us to think Dodo and others are mistaken in thinking that it is because of Jan's sick and twisted imagination—that he is really doing it, or thinks he is, for Bess, just as she is doing it, or thinks she is, for him...
...the weak are crushed...
...He cannot understand it, and David's talent and his life are both irretrievably shattered...
...You have to be fit and strong...
...The joke is that there is hardly any difference between the original and the made-over Rose...
...E-mail him at 72o56.3226@compuserve.com...
...The elder Helfgott has to understand that his virtue is also his vice, and that holding too tightly is the way to lose...
...He repeats mechanically the old man's axioms —"Only the fit survive...
...Brilliant as Rush's performance is, Hicks never quite reconciles the comedy and the pathos in David's madness, or in his love affair with and eventual marriage to Gillian (Lynn Redgrave), who provides the inspiration for him to go back on the concert stage...
...She's got to get out of here, get on with life," he tells her sister-in-law, Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge), who unwittingly contributes to the tragedy by telling him, "She would do anything for you, to put a smile on your face...
...The American Spectator January 1997 65...
...When he Love usually means having to say you're sorry...
...She manages to persuade the elders to allow her to marry him...
...What kind of life, exactly, does he want her to get on with...
...Oddly, however, for JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement this feel-good picture, she uses a couple of crowd-pleasers from Puccini's Turandot to symbolize romance without a thought for the opera's tragic dimension...
...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...point of it all, I think, is just to discredit the narrowness and hypocrisy of the film's Christians and to present an alternative religious statement on behalf of the Church of What's Happenin' Now...
...64 January 1997 The American Spectator regains consciousness and realizes that he will be paralyzed for the rest of his life, Jan decides that he has to force Bess to be free of him...
...The pathos of this desperate pleading, like the grim determination with which he proceeds to burn the pages of his lovingly tended scrapbook of David's triumphs, is unforgettable...
...One cannot help but feel that Hitchcock himself had looked into the abyss, and that not only this but all his cynical, brittle films were made as a sort of hedge or fence to keep himself well away from it...
...Beyond this it has only one point to make, which is a defense of romantic, passionate love against what she erroneously supposes to be the Platonic ideal of those old-time courtly lovers...
...A reminder that this view of love has not always held sway, even in Hollywood, came with the release of a restored version of Vertigo, originally made in 1958 by Alfred Hitchcock...
...But clearly the whole film is an exercise in self-indulgence and wish-fulfillment...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 1
