Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen SHEIK, RATTLE, & ROLE ROMANCE & DISILLUSIONMENT I LIKE THE idea of John Sayles a lot. That a young writer with a passion for movies would make his own, working within whatever budget he...
...In between the scenes, something must be going on in each that compels them to put up with all the pain and embarrassment they cause each other...
...Although their backgrounds make them very different - she's a princess from a middle-class Jewish family, he's a "greaser" from working-class Italians - they dated in high school...
...What he creates instead is a slick, backlit, softcore scene that looks as if it might have been directed by the horny filmmaker he is playing in his movie...
...The only problem I have with this conception of Sayles is that I haven't particularly liked the movies...
...We never believe that this resolution of their love will last longer than this one moment...
...They were what the movie was about...
...What will be left once the teenage role-playing has been abandoned and the immature feelings left behind...
...What can it be...
...If you're going to make a movie on a ridiculously low budget, you ought to get something special for your trouble...
...They have so little in common, and seem so intent on disappointing one another, that we begin to wonder what keeps bringing each back for more...
...What was the point of doing this material as a movie instead of a play, or another novel, where Sayles could have achieved the acute observation of which he appeared incapable with a camera...
...There were moments of brightness and pathos in the dialogue, but the movie seemed to be trying to get by on dialogue alone...
...It should be a work of great originality, as Godard's Breathless was, since originality is all it will have going for it...
...Here are shades of Jean-Luc Godard, an auteur with a vision so compelling, at least to him, that he needs nothing to make a movie except his own energy and exuberance...
...The girl is Jill (Roseanna Arquette), and the boy is "the Sheik" (Vincent Spano...
...But then when she does go out with him, he takes her to a bar where he ignores her all evening, sitting at a separate table shooting the bull with his buddies...
...His second film, Lianna, doesn't seem to be much of an improvement in this regard...
...Yet now they are meeting again in his dingy rented room in Miami, making love as if it were some urgent, unfinished business between them...
...But Return seemed to lack that kind of interest in moviemaking per se...
...This theme works better for Sayles because it allows him to stand aloof from his own, conventional style of moviemaking...
...Until the release of his current film, Baby, It's You, the idea of John Sayles has been more attractive than the reality...
...Where he was the one who always lost his cool before, now it's her turn...
...The new movie makes me take Sayles himself as seriously as the idea, though...
...The balance of the film explores this scene's repercussions, and the further out the ripples go, the subtler and more engaging Sayles's observations are...
...Except for a series of inconclusive conversations among some old friends, nothing happens in Return...
...This scene works, where the one in Lianna doesn't, because Sayles doesn't want to draw us inside his characters' relationship here...
...Sayles's apprenticeship in movies was on screenplays like Piranha and Battle Beyond the Stars for quickie producer Roger Corman, from whom Sayles learned the basic grammar, and much of the cliche rhetoric, of filmmaking...
...This doesn't serve him well in the lesbian seduction that is Lianna's central theme...
...This leaves their relationship in a state of suspended animation, and her experiences her first year at college offer a strange parallel, a kind of repetition in counterpoint, to those of her last year in high school...
...We are given, instead, a scene as impersonal and chilly as the atmospheric blue light in which it is shot...
...This is generally true of her years at Sarah Lawrence...
...I had some doubts whether Sayles's first film, The Return of the Secaucus 7, was really worth the effort...
...This time they're ready for the celebration de passage a prom is supposed to be...
...Baby, It's You contains a scene of lovemaking between a boy and a girl that is very similar in execution...
...When Godard made Breathless, he was bursting with new ideas about camera work and editing...
...They were the excitement, the action...
...Far from turning his low budget and independence into an advantage, he seemed to regret not being able to do the film as more standard fare...
...He wants us to remain dubious, to see through the erotic romance that his treatment of the scene represents...
...From the first time that Sheik tries to pick up Jill in the school cafeteria, almost every scene between them ends in irritation, dismay, a rebuff...
...Her binge in Miami making love with him doesn't resolve their unfinished relationship either, as the specious rendering that Sayles gives the scene might indicate...
...These are moments of poignant comedy...
...but it is a sweet, romantic moment just the same...
...At last amidst the wreckage of their respective dreams - his failure to break into show business in Miami, and hers to make her mark at Sarah Lawrence - they are re-united on the eve of another prom...
...Having only the most static of situations to show, Sayles filmed them in the most conventional and invariable of ways...
...Their lust is just another of those experiences they have to get through in order to get to whatever it is that has held them together against all teenage odds...
...She's at Sarah Lawrence, while he's washing dishes in a Miami club trying to break into show biz...
...As well imagined as any among them is a scene where a filmmaker and resident ladykiller, played by Sayles himself, makes a pass at Lianna because she's left her husband...
...That a young writer with a passion for movies would make his own, working within whatever budget he could raise (on his first feature, that was only $60,000), appeals to me...
...He needs to risk in the filmmaking a kind of clumsiness and explicitness that the seduction itself has for the title character...
...Baby is in general a more successful film because it is not about romance and disillusionment, but rather the reverse - about how disil-lusionments can lead into a romance instead of away from one...
...He pesters her to go out with him, lurks in the corridor outside her classroom, comes to her rehearsal at the drama club and makes her blow her lines...
...They have gone their separate ways since then...
...but this time she gets drunk and dominates the conversation, as if she were reacting less to present company than to her memory of him - as if she wanted to make sure she weren't ignored again...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.ESTERBECK, JR...
...The commitment lies elsewhere...
...To succeed fully, however, Lianna needs a seduction scene as human and amusing as Sayles wants the rest of his movie to be...
...She goes on a double date to a bar, as she did with Sheik the year before, for instance...
...The movie is best when showing us how the woman's children are affected, or how the football-coach husband of her best friend is...
...Nor is anything going on cinemat-ically...
...The film as a whole demands a scene that will draw us inside these two women's relationship, that will make us sympathize with their sexuality, make us feel their affection...
...Finally, she throws up...
...The style of the film doesn't ask us to make a commitment to the characters...
...Her demurs and his machismo are both so transparent, such juvenile poses, that we can't help taking an indulgent attitude toward these two kids...
...Just before their senior prom, Sheik is thrown out of school...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 10
