Love Stories

...he trouble we have suspending disbelief is compounded by the sluggish pace Gantillon wastes a great deal of time following Jerome up and down stairs, lingering on closeups of tableware and dogging Maria on her solitary walks—giving rise to the suspicion that the director himself recognized the sketchiness of the script and felt compelled to pad it with the worst kind of kitschy color photography (courtesy of Etienne Szabo) When Gantillon "opens up" the story by taking the camera outside the mansion with Jerome and Maria, the effect is to dissipate the claustrophobic atmosphere necessary to intensify the interaction between the two Another problem with the film is that where it is not langorous it verges on incomprehensibility Maria briefly engages the services of a new maid as a spectator/participant to the couple's contest of wills But the maid's active complicity in their perverse rituals occurs so quickly, and the violent climax that leads to the termination of her employment is so elliptically edited that it is hard to figure out exactly what happened Later, Maria picks up a gentleman in a park and forces Jerome to clean his boots The stranger, though, quickly guesses the nature of the game, the suggestion being that he immediately intuits some kind of class solidarity with Jerome Yet this sort of social comment represents an awkward intrusion into the psychological fabric of the movie The performers do about as much as they can with the sparse material Lanoux mugs shamelessly with his pudgy baby face and sleepy bedroom eyes, but this may be due more to his desperation at having to play a character as motiveless as Jerome than to hammmess Ferreol is far better as the smoldenngly resentful Maria When Jerome first arrives at the mansion, ignorant of her newly acquired fortune, he peremptorily orders her to carry his bags to his room, unpack them and draw him a bath Ferreol masterfully manages to blend a brief, indignant stare into an ironic ghost of a smile as she watches him confidently stride up the stairs It is too bad that for the most part Gantillon and Szabo treat her unkindly After she picks up a young male hustler to humiliate herself and Jerome, Maria is shown pinned half naked to a wall in a particularly disgusting and uncharacteristically graphic sex scene (The rest of the movie is in such dubious "good taste" that it could earn a rating of "B"—for boring ) As if that were not enough, the sequence is lit and shot in a way that makes her skin look green and waxy —in case we didn't already get the point about her self-abasement The one thing that can be said about Servant and Mistress, unlike A Different Story, is that it lives up to its title But this simply means that the film almost exhausts all its possibilities from the outset In fact, one wonders why it was made at all...

...On Screen LOVE STORES BY ROBERT ASAHINA w T T hat's so different about A Different Story'' Not Alan Belkin's slick production, which has all the virtues of a carefully packaged made-for-TV movie Not Paul Aaron's indifferent direction, which rrferely confirms the mistake he made in abandoning the stage for the cinema Not David Frank's score and Bob Wahler's "original" songs, which were apparently manufactured with an ear for the Muzak market And certainly not the story by Henry Olek, a veteran writer for the small screen, which follows a familiar formula boy meets-wins-loses-re-gams girl What is different about this new film is that the boy, Albert (Perry King), is a homosexual, and the girl, Stella (Meg Foster), is a lesbian He is an unemployed designer who was lured to Los Angeles and then abandoned by a capricious "patron", she is a hardworking and ambitious real-estate agent They "meet cute" when she discovers him illegally living in a house she is showing to some prospective buyci s Stella and Albert are soon sold on the virtues of cohabitation, and the movie's slim claim to originality starts dwindling, as it rapidly moves into Neilsimonland She turns out to be a total slob, while he is fastidious to the point of compulsiveness He cooks, cleans, sews and nags ("You should have let me know you were going to be late—my Swedish meatballs are all dried up, and my greenbeans are shriveled"), while she alternates between good-natured grumbling ("I can't plan my life around your meals") and grudging appreciation ("Albert, my mother should have had you instead of me") About halfway through, A Different Story drops even the barest pretense of being different, for Albert and Stella somewhat improbably fall in love, their social roles and sexual proclivities becoming totally reversed They wind up as one more normal Odd Couple who marry, have a child and move to the soulless suburbs Now he is the enterprising breadwinner and she sits at home and whines He even has an extramarital affair —with a woman, of course, as befits his new respectability (The single bit of suspense in the plot arises when she wrongly infers from a number of clumsily contrived clues that he is seeing a man ) The banalitv of this oh-so-daring but not-really-so-queer affair is especially dismaying because the filmmakers actually had the germ of a potentially fruitful (though hardly earth-shaking) idea—to suggest just how much of what we regard as sexuality is really a matter of cultural convention Unfortunately, Olek's script settles for cliches Why does a homosexual initially have to be portrayed as cloying and effeminate9 Only because Olek mistakenly believed it would constitute a compelling contrast to have him eventually metamorphose into a male-chauvinist pig who loves his job and himself more than his family Why does a lesbian have to be characterized at the start as an aggressive slob9 Only so Olek can convert her later into a frustrated and compulsive housewife, jealous of her husband's independence In short, the movie risks nothing Even the character of Phyllis (Valerie Curtin), Stella's estranged lover in the first half of the film, is little more than a gross parody of a possessive, paranoid, childish, and suicidal Sapphic —an insulting caricature aggravated by Curtin's hystena-thinly-disguised-as-histnomcs Any film purveying such crude cartoon figures should expect to be picketed by radical activists I suspect, however, that A Different Storv will probably succeed best where it should offend most Movie lesbians, following their brief moment in the sun about 10 years ago (The Fox, The Killing of Sister George, The Legend oj Lylah Clare), have lately become a rare and exotic breed So there just might be a large latent (or not so latent) demand for the scant titillation supplied by the spectacle ot two women kissing As for homosexuals, it is not exactly news that they ha\e come out of the closet and onto the screen But people who go to see this mo\ le because of their sexual bent are bound to be disappointed, particularh b\ king's bland role and bland pertor-mance Blandness is, in tact, probabK the key to the failure of the whole enterprise This moue's mam problem is not ineptitude, it is a craven desire to flatter the widest possible audience (homosexuals in the first hour, heterosexuals in the second—or should that be vice versa7) Of course, a more limited "appeal" would not necessarily have improved the film But it certainly would have been less insipid—and lived up to its title Servant and Mistress, directed by Bruno Gantillon and written by Frantz-Andre Burguet and Dominique Fabre, also concerns a "meaningful" relationship—with the emphasis on "mean " After his aged uncle dies, Jerome (Victor Lanoux), a young career diplomat living overseas, expects to inherit the family estate outside Pans When he returns home, too late for the funeral, he is astonished to discover that the entire inheritance—money, land, house, car, personal possessions—has been left to his uncle's only servant, Maria (Andrea Ferreol), the family's maid from the days of Jerome's youth Mana, remembering the indignities —sexual and otherwise—she suffered at his hands years ago, is now determined to turn the tables on Jerome Since he is penniless, he agrees to play her game, hoping to charm her into sharing the fortune She has other ideas, and begins to institute a ruthless, subtle regimen of discipline and humiliation When he tries to wheedle her into buying him a tuxedo to wear to a diplomatic function, for instance, she leads him to believe that she will—then presents him with a butler's uniform instead Thus the former young master slowly becomes the servant, and the maid becomes the new mistress His financial dependency, though, is nothing compared to her emotional dependency The more she humiliates him and the more willingly he submits to her perverse will, the more she debases herself At the end, having realized her defeat, she abjectly makes the ultimate gesture of self-degradation—suicide But the movie dies long before that, partly as a result of its denvativeness Servant and Mistress invites—and suffers by—comparison to Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter's The Servant, Lih-ana Cavani's The Night Porter, and L P Hartley and Alan Bridges' The Hireling (to take some recent films that vary widely in quality) Worse than the lmitativeness are the gaping holes and unanswered questions in the story How could Maria have been the only servant in that huge house7 Who did all the cleaning before she started cracking the whip over Jerome's head7 And even if we concede that it is a necessary plot device to isolate the two, why should we believe that he would so readily accept her little game7 Very early on, he asks her, "Is it a test7 Do I have a chance to win7" Her answer is such an ambiguous yes that it is difficult to accept his abandoning all of his other pursuits, including career success, in the slim hope that he will prevail Moreover, it is never clear what he will win —we are presumably supposed to infer that the stakes are the inheritance, but in view of the fact that Maria dies without ever visibly making out her will in his favor, Jerome should have been a little more cautious T ^L...