Screen:
Baumann, Paul
SCREEN WHAT'S LEFT OF DESIRE? 'PRETTY WOMAN' & 'TOO BEAUTIFUL' Director Garry Marshall's popular new film, Pretty Woman, takes its title from Roy Orbison's wonderful rock 'n' roll standard....
...Nothing least of all a smile is given away for free...
...Only one sin exists in Edward and Vivian's world: being poor...
...don't make me cry...
...On the job, Vivian dresses in a raggedy halter top tied with a metal ring to a blue vinyl miniskirt...
...Of course Vivian eventually wins a place in Edward's small and stony heart...
...he exclaims, awed by the woman he sees on the street...
...Orbison growls and coos his way through the song's plaintive lyrics...
...She's like my sister, the one I never had," Depardieu tells his uncomprehending spouse...
...Why would a man risk the love of a "perfect" wife in a questionable dalliance...
...Shiny black leather boots complete her novice's outfit...
...This is, especially at the beginning, a very funny movie...
...The simplistic parallel between prostitution and greedy stock manipulators is revisited endlessly...
...As Depardieu eyes his prospective mistress, we are transported forward and back in time.and in and out of his paranoid comic imaginings...
...Pretty Woman is a story of unself-conscious vulgarity that pretends to be a lesson in the redemptive power of love...
...In Too Beautifulfor You, his small, furtive eyes peek out around his formidable Gallic proboscis like a kid sizing up a candy counter...
...The dumb things in life are the best," he confesses...
...What Marshall does to Orbison's song in this movie is a damnable sin...
...Sex," as Malcolm Muggeridge has observed, "is the mysticism of materialism...
...Or, "A man wants to live several lives, but he can't...
...She and her pal (Laura San Giacomo) who sleeps with a teddy bear when not otherwise employed prowl the street in front of Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theater...
...Edward, the imperious businessman, hires our tarnished heroine for a week's work, and installs her in the penthouse of the lasciviously appointed Wilshire Beverly Hilton...
...Vivian literally buys her salvation, shedding the rags of her past and being invested in the transfiguring garments only money can buy...
...Will Vivian's newly acquired trousseau turn to rags and the limo back into a pumpkin at the end of the week...
...To the beat of "Pretty Woman," an orgy of purchasing follows...
...Mercy...
...Later, forbidden truths are improbably voiced...
...She's a traffic stopper...
...Too Beautifulfor You gives several piquant answers...
...Orbison, with his goofy black eyeglasses, pasty complexion, and putty-like features, was the homeliest of rock stars...
...Money is the heat that excites their blood...
...Depardieu is a wonder to behold as he reacts to his wife's pretentious musings, or to his son's sudden and suspicious interest in the extravagantly romantic music of Schubert...
...Sexual exhilaration has turned the world upside down...
...Between all the conspicuous consuming and conspicuously glossy sex, nothing as crudely mortal as physical love or even a little honest lust ever intrudes in Pretty Woman...
...Andrew Marvell gave it a memorable metaphysical twist: "Had we but World enough and Time, This coyness Lady were no crime...
...Or are they...
...But the best answer he gives, in what is finally an overly long and too self-conscious movie, is one that wisely affirms the contingency and grace of sex and of life itself...
...Pretty woman," Orbison sings, "don't walk on by...
...The Grave's a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace...
...Worse, Marshall uses Orbison's song not to express the power and mystery of human longing or sexual attraction, but as testament to the higher eroticism of credit cards and social status...
...This is especially effective in capturing the range of Depardieu's emotions during a dinner party with his wife and their friends...
...Pretty Woman" is about being smitten by the unpredictable power of beauty about being struck dumb by desire...
...To a man who questions his imprudent behavior, Depardieu says of his wife's physical perfection, "What's left to desire...
...Sex alone, however, cannot turn sanitized pandering into human emotion or leaden wit into gold...
...PAUL BAUMANN...
...Pretty woman, give your smile to me...
...Sex, as everyone knows, is better in France...
...But his lilting tenor had an unusual melancholy purity, and for anyone who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, "Pretty Woman" was canonical: it defined the delirious promise of romance, the magic serendipity of sexual attraction...
...Having previously been turned away from Beverly Hills' fancy shops because of her slatternly appearance, Vivian returns accompanied by her corporate knight...
...Blier first teases us by juxtaposing various spoken and unspoken communications...
...Given her infectious childlike enthusiasms, she is soon the favorite of management and bellhops alike...
...He only has one, and it's short...
...PAUL BAUMANNbout...
...Actually, not being filthy rich...
...After her first assignation with her new lover, she comically imagines that every man she passes is an importuning admirer...
...But she is also icy and somehow terribly fragile and pathetic...
...Josiane Balasko is like a pure, translucent piece of Steuben glass as Depardieu's beautiful wife...
...Carole Bouquet makes an even deeper impression as the frankly carnal mistress, a woman who allows her life to take shape around her passions...
...Or will she continue to jet off to San Francisco for the opera and toot on over to the polo club for cocktails and vicious chitchat...
...He's a cathedral presence, with all kinds of dark corners as well as unexpected felicities...
...I've just made love for three hours," she confides to a bewildered stranger...
...And in Pretty Woman (better titled Pretty Money), that mysticism is called upon to effect all manner of alchemies...
...Well, if Too Beautifulfor You is any indication, at least it remains recognizably human there...
...Julia Roberts (Steel Magnolias) plays a young prostitute named Vivian...
...Pygmalion and Cinderella make up the rest of this contemporary fable...
...Gerard Depardieu stars in this very European story about a man who abandons his exquisite wife for a rather plain and somewhat chunky mistress...
...We both screw people for money," Edward (Richard Gere), an impeccably tailored corporate raider, tells Vivian after he picks her up...
...Like most contemporary Hollywood romances, its sexual imagination is perverted by an epicurean devotion to the power of money...
...Depardieu, who has wielded his imposing bulk to good effect in Martin Guerre and other wonderful movies, has flying buttresses for shoulders and the face of a gargoyle...
...That's what Roy Orbison was singing about...
...It's a venerable theme...
...They've both had miserable childhoods, or so the pillow talk informs us...
...Director Bertrand Blier (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs), plays mischievously with fantasy and an elliptical narrative style...
...But both Vivian and Edward are whores with hearts of gold, we are told...
Vol. 117 • May 1990 • No. 9
