Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L Jr.
Screen THE RUNNER MUMBLES OFF THE TRACK Personal best is a film that makes me feel I should come out of the closet, or get into it. Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly are both actresses with...
...Their lesbianism gives off a certain ancient musk, a whiff of Eros...
...Meanwhile, the emotional life that Chris and Torie lead is an inconclusive mess...
...Every physical sensation, even the pain they experience working out, has a keen ecstasy to it, a sublime grace...
...The hang-ups this movie has ultimately belong to writer-director Robert Towne, who is less ardent about Chris and Tone than he at first seems...
...I can't remember a film with a message as tried-and-true as that since Wee Geordie came out in the 1950s...
...But this doesn't mean that he himself is ready to accept their lesbianism...
...What Chris really needs, in order to get her track act together and score in the big meet,-turns out to be a boyfriend (Kenny Moore...
...The eroticism here is as vivid and exciting as anything that's been put on the screen since the old taboos were lifted in movies back in the sixties...
...Their feelings just can't catch up with their bodies, and in the end the slow motion and sound effects only emphasize the gulf between the two...
...Unfortunately, like the athlete in Housman's ode, this movie dies young...
...The discipline of one aspect of their lives grants the license to the other aspect...
...On the contrary, the script he has written contains a hidden agenda for straightening Chris out...
...Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly are both actresses with the slight, lithe, nearly perfect bodies of female athletes...
...These young women seem like goddesses...
...Chris (Hemingway) and Torie (Donnelly) have met while competing at a track meet...
...They are complete within themselves...
...Every exertion is pure, concentrated, absolute, decisive...
...They mumble their way incoherently through all the ups and down of their on-again, off-again relationships...
...Chris and Tone's coach (Scott Glenn) may not be able to do it, but some sort of man has to...
...And at the same time, they and their friends are such a bunch of }aid-back California airheads...
...If they take each other as lovers, it must be because no one else is fit for them...
...In light of recent disclosures by Billy Jean King, Towne can practically take a lesbian relationship between his athlete heroines for granted...
...After putting all its liberation up front, Personal Best ends by once more affirming a proper boy-girl relationship as the only road to success in competition...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Nothing between them ever comes clear or gets resolved or makes sense...
...He can throw them together after only three scenes as if it's the most natural thing in the world...
...The characters these actresses play never quite achieve the unity of being for which their sex life - in a strictly aesthetic sense, of course - might have stood...
...It is part of that larger eroticism in which ail aspects of life, emotional and physical, are unified...
...The movie emphasizes this with lots of slow motion sequences and sound effects of pounding blood and gasping breath...
...Their exquisite, vaguely hermaphroditic beauty appears to contain all they need of the male as well as the female sex...
...When they took off their clothes and made love to each other after only a few scenes, the film managed to grab my attention with a forceful-ness that it never again achieved...
...and in the relationship that they quickly develop, the running, the training, and the sex do seem to have a glorious wholeness, almost a wholesomeness...
...These two women are so incredible to look at, so magnificient to watch in motion...
Vol. 109 • April 1982 • No. 8
