Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN DECENT EXPOSURE 'DEVIL' & 'ROXANNE' D evil in the Flesh and Jean de Florette are two of the most stylish summer movie imports. Both boast long pedigrees in literary and film history....
...When Bellachio adds a parallel between love and madness, I trembled, fearing Foucault, Ken Russell (cf...
...Specifically, he inserts several vivid carnal scenes between his heroine (Maruschka Detmers) and a young man who stirs her passion...
...Such Marcusian cant can be excused to a small degree...
...If anything, Martin lets him off too easy...
...We don't get irony here...
...His greatest pleasure, he says, is "taking meat sandwiches into the redwoods...
...The idea that capitalists hate sex seems limited and outdated (and disproved by the industry's enthusiasm for films like this one...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Still, Martin's incidental satire often amuses...
...She plays an amateur astronomer visiting the Pacific Northwest...
...Devil in the Flesh certainly contains many scenes whose explicit sexuality will bring a blush to anyone this side of paradise...
...The fuss illustrated the unwillingness of too many critics to acknowledge that the X rating performs a service: even more than PG and R ratings, it alerts parents and theater managers to their moral responsibility to children and teenagers...
...The film thus raises the issue of how one even partially recommends an X-rated film and still takes seriously the problem of media sensationalism and its corrupting effects...
...Nevertheless, not every X film is pornographic...
...One twist catches the essence of its goofy, but often enjoyable take-off on tradition...
...It's a mock-heroic — thoroughly crackpot but periodically brilliant in its revision of a classic...
...There's a Groucho inside Martin...
...The farcical results include an inevitable, full-fledged revision of Cyrano's balcony scene, with Martin pleading the Hunk's suit in lyrical terms Rossovich cannot even understand...
...A: "Same as a regular year but with less calories...
...Bellachio skillfully employs bright, brazenly colored photography and sparkling settings...
...In some circles, of course, it is considered gauche (actually, droite) to say anything good about ratings at all...
...There are, amazingly, people (men) like this...
...She likes Martin as a friend, but for obvious reasons is drawn more to the strong, silent Hunk (Rick Rossovich), whom she is led to mistake for an intellectual...
...Fortunately, Detmers's performance saved much of the film, especially her torturous oscillations between mental anguish and radiant, stunning laughter...
...the sexuality...
...Roxanne is also loosely based on a French clas- sic, Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac...
...She wants somebody that looks like me and talks like you...
...His humor in the past has been very uneven...
...The gorgeous landscape remains mostly a passive setting...
...he just one-lines one time too many...
...Perhaps Martin was trying to do too much with this film...
...The fine domestic gothic architecture (from the post-pioneer 1890s) is never properly imperiled by flames...
...When Hannah describes herself as "ironic," Martin responds in a flat, small-town voice, "Oh, people here ski and smoke dope...
...There are some spectacles which should simply not be seen by everyone...
...As "Church Lady" might say (with justice) on Saturday Night Live, "Isn't that special...
...Roxanne slaps at them too politely...
...Yes...
...otherwise, he trembles, "I'd have to talk to her...
...At the end of the balcony scene, the Hunk accidentally puts his finger on something about Roxanne...
...Tootsie and All of Me assaulted sexual stereotypes with gusto...
...He watches for humor at every turn (quipping on a long stairway: "I haven't climbed this many steps since I went to the Maharishi...
...he drones...
...Jean de Florette (of which more next time) is based on the Provence novels of supreme neorealist filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, and won eight nominations for 1986 Cesars...
...The hue and cry that resulted would have made one think that Angel Heart was a long-lost Eisen-stein rather than a movie that quickly dropped out of sight...
...People can't keep their eyes off It...
...If only libertarians would stop being as prudish and taboo-ridden in regard to any hint at moral limits as prim Victorians ever were in regard to sex...
...But Martin also transcends the mockery with specific contemporary points...
...one could listen to that laugh for a long time...
...normalissima.'' His adieu to terrorism, in short, makes him less sexy...
...Roxanne mines much of his best vein and, like the heroine's nomenclature, comically blends lyrical and banal...
...The film is directed by Fred Schepisi, but its ruling Puck is Martin...
...Hannah's Roxanne is a type of single American woman who is often faced with constant pressure from men who can't handle her intelligence...
...when they stare, they often put their foot in their mouth, Hannah first, with a hilarious comment when she meets It...
...The fire plot is weakly executed, with too much reliance on keystone-cops routines...
...It can be vulgar and sophomoric...
...Hannah hasn't been this good since Splash, and Martin since All of Me...
...Detmers is engaged to a repentant terrorist who now bores her with his desire to lead a normal life— "nor-male...
...The plot tutors Hannah out of her mistake...
...Claude Autant-Lara first made it into a slightly shocking film in 1947...
...Not long ago, in order to get an R rather than an X rating, the director of Angel Heart was forced to trim a bizarre, blood-tinged sex scene involving an older man and a teenager who turned out to be the man's daughter...
...How docs one judge a film that mixes equal parts of indecency and sensitivity...
...How many smart, kind men, because they are not "Hunks,"fear approaching women...
...Devil in the Flesh is an Italian film loosely based on the classic 1923 novel by Raymond Radiguet—a kind of French Fare well to Arms — \n which a French woman married to a soldier at the front forgets her "duty"and carries on a wild affair with a high school student...
...Line readings with deft hesitations keep It a continual source of humor...
...The film's title character is played by Daryl Hannah, who reveals herself as a superb comedienne in tandem with Steve Martin, starring in his own screenplay...
...If only the Ratings Board X-ed slasher films...
...could be aimed at youthful viewers of violent films with no redeeming social value...
...Only the Nose knows...
...It has four characters: Hannah's Roxanne, the Hunk of a fireman she falls in love with by sight, Martin, and the inevitable Nose...
...His plot suggests that law-abiding citizens are incapable oi passion...
...too often, they're dramatically flat...
...The setting is now Italy, where director Marco Bellachio freely adapts Radiguet's tale of sexual and political liberation with all the frankness that modern cinema can tolerate...
...The Hunk is horrified by anything but sex...
...Singly, his lines are funny...
...His sources, however, are hoary...
...On a starry night in her romantic rooftop observatory, draping her golden tresses over a telescope and watching "binary stars that long to make conjunction," she moans to Martin that she wants to name a comet "Kowalski...
...his travesty on Byron, Gothic), and that other adepts of ecstasy were about to snake their way in and lecture us on the merits of insanity...
...one scene in particular surely merited the X. But the film contains no violence, no degradation forced on its heroine...
...1 only wish that such efforts at censorship (horrors...
...Martin also tosses in tangential one-liners that you can tell come from a piggy bank of unused jokes (Q: "What's a light year...
...Alas, he's a jerk...
...The new Devil shakes off the past, so to speak, like a burdensome garment...
...Lucky that his technique and her acting are compelling on their own terms, without ideology...
...How many women unconsciously conspire in their own loneliness by acquiescing in the "Hunk" definition of male glamour...
...Turning to Martin, he exclaims, "She wants us...
...But will it burn down before its moment in the sun (or snow...
...Where he succeeds best is the romance, which both imitates and updates Rostand...
...Steve Martin has a Nose, a Very Big Nose, less like Jose Ferrer's than Pinocchio's...
...Bellachio lives in a country where moral codes may still produce allied cultural conservatism in sex and politics...
...Martin retches until she indignantly informs him "that's my last name...
...it can also yield witty social commentary and inspired slapstick...
...Martin also should have pushed his sexual satire harder, and questioned women as well as men...
...As the mayor (still a 19 June I9S7: 387 fireman part-time) gloats, "It could be another Aspen...
...Not all of Roxanne's elements blend perfectly...
...But the screenplay could have used more comment on the stereotypes* about "attractive" males that cripple relations between the sexes today almost as much as male chauvinism...
...What is really objectionable is not so much the sex as the politics, especially Bellachio's fantasy that ecstasy begets Utopia...
...romanticism has rarely been more gloriously spoofed...
...moreover, is central to the story of a woman coming of age in the middle of some highly acute emotional confusion...
...He's a fire chief in a big town/small city, cusped between funky neighborliness and gentrification from tourism and skiing...
Vol. 114 • June 1987 • No. 12
