On Screen
MORRONE, JOHN
On Screen TAKES OF TWO CITIES BY JOHN MORRONE NEW York Stories is a highpowered revival of a narrative format that has been largely passé since the mid-'60s: the sequence film, with one or...
...While he works, Lionel fills his lof t with a constant rock-and-roll blare, and what aids creativity snuffs out communication...
...It was nothing personal...
...Along with her similarly wealthy friends at the Fieldston School, she is confident, sophisticated and unbearably shallow...
...He's lovesick, too...
...the Age of Reason...
...The theme linking sequences is Manipulation—of people, circumstances and one's own past...
...And the oddest people keep appearing: Sting, as an Austrian soldier about to be executed, Valentina Cortese as a slave girl, Robin Williams (unbilled) as the frantic, oversexed King of the Moon...
...Money buys happiness for Zoe, not for us: There's not a bit of joie de vivre in "Life Without Zoe.' One waits an eternity for Woody Allen to show up, but "Oedipus Wrecks" turns out to be about yet another kind of manipulation...
...Although the plot has something to do with the 12-year-old's scheme to reunite her farflung parents, the details that stick are the Hershey's Kisses she throws at the homeless man who lives in a box on Fifth Avenue...
...Millstein...
...New York Stories assumes—and expects the audience to assume—that "only in New York" could the tales it tells unfold...
...Zoe's life flaunts itself carelessly, and the girl in all her pint-sized shrillness comes to resemble the overstuffed society matron whose perfume is too heavy and whose voice is too loud...
...Oh, something Jewish," he mutters— "whore...
...They are: "Life Lessons," directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Richard Price...
...Its unfinished state makes Lionel anxious...
...She cozies up to visiting Middle Eastern princes, hails taxis with aplomb, and has access to a vast allowance that is 100 per cent disposable, unearned income...
...The film is in many ways Gilliam's thematic follow-up to Brazil, but this fable of how imagination conquers bureaucratic inertia is happier, brighter, even more unpredictable...
...Thus, the man who sought to rid himself of one Jewish mother ends up with two, and anticipates spending his life henpecked by both mother and wife...
...and "Oedipus Wrecks," directed, written and starring Woody Allen...
...Similarly, the lessons in life that Lionel claims to be teaching Paulette—how not to use and be used—are shown to be contradictory, and the trick ending is of course that once Paulette walks, she's effortlessly replaced...
...The city, run by callow bureaucrats (the slimiest one is played by Jonathan Pryce), is on the point of surrender when the aged Baron Munchausen (John Neville) arrives...
...Momentarily relieved of Mother, the son's mood clears and his sex life improves, but she returns as a disembodied head floating over Manhattan, spewing abuse at her son and making the whole City privy to her version of Sheldon's life story, from bed-wetting boy to hapless bachelor...
...Francis Coppola's tasteless "Life Without Zoe," set in an arid and even higher-rent district than "Life Lessons," could arguably be titled "Life Without Life...
...It also allows Scorsese to side with Lionel and stack the deck against Paulette, who remains underdeveloped...
...The Baron renews their faith in themselves, they return with him to Vienna, and inspire the people to triumph...
...But sequence films also let the storyteller "off the hook," since the unifying factor is the focus, not the director, whose chief concern is maintaining his own voice among the ensemble...
...Cards on the table, and no apologies...
...Oedipus Wrecks" is New York Stories' ninth circle of metropolitan hell, and I walked away from the film convinced I had spent two hours-plus in an inferno characterized by gridlock, bad white wine, and exact-change fares—a lessthan-divine comedy...
...Millstein-inthe-sky is "saying horrible things about me in foreign words, like 'courveh.'" She asks Sheldon what it means...
...Anyone who recalls Dead of Night, the famous British horror anthology, or De Sica's Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, or Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, has enjoyed what often was an appealing kind of storytelling that several generations of episode television have, alas, eclipsed...
...As an Antidote let me offer, briefly, a story about another city in Terry Gilliam'sbig, noisy, tumultuous fantasy, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen...
...Sheldon is still being brutalized, however, by his monumentally vulgar, outspoken mother, Mrs...
...Millstein (Mae Questel...
...Baron Munchausen is all pyrotechnics, Eastern splendor, and bathroom humor—poised, one might say, somewhere between Orientalia and genitalia...
...Nothing seems very "personal" to these people...
...Price's script is heartlessly savvy, revealing the way these gifted, ruthless New Yorkers get it on and get ahead...
...All of these scenes of Lionel at work demonstrate that his career is far more fulfilling than his romantic relationship, despite his protesting otherwise...
...Much like the storybook Eloise who lived at the Plaza, Zoe (Heather McComb is a little rich girl who lives at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, where she is attended by a manservant and left to her own devices by her globetrotting parents...
...Wednesday," and cannonbursts from Turkish artillery are shattering Vienna...
...A Vienna about to fall, the Baron sings, is "no place for cucumber trees, no place for three-legged cyclops, no place for me...
...She'll only cooperate when Sheldon, now dumped by his WASP fiancée, falls for earthy, possessive, zaftig Treva (Julie Kavner), a phony psychic he originally hired to exorcise Mrs...
...To subdue the Turks he then travels far and wide to reunite his former cohorts, who have given up their own peculiar talents (superstrength, superspeed, superbreath, among others) and become slaves to other potentates...
...Lisa complains that Mrs...
...A curvaceous new candidate vamps Lionel for the job at the gallery opening where he finally exhibits his now-finished canvas: a mural-sized panorama that seems to depict a city in flames...
...Scorsese makes no attempt to reconcile this sad and unnerving image, Lionel's vision of a city in distress, with his own casual and offhanded portrait of New York as the playground of emotional deadbeats...
...It's her tool for manipulating her surroundings, and she works at that without complaint...
...In "Life Lessons," the fleshy and powerfully-built Nick Nolte plays Lionel, a famous, middle-aged, grizzly-ina-tux Soho artist stuck midway in the creation of a huge canvas that sits accusingly uncompleted in a loft strewn with a paint and Brillo-pad compost...
...Hoping to manipulate his own past by suppressing it, Sheldon is instead punished by a virago who cannot be controlled...
...Millstein, "chosen at random from our audience, " vanishes from inside a steamer trunk that's been pierced with swords...
...Allen plays Sheldon Mills, an executive engaged to be married to Lisa (Mia Farrow, again standing in for Allen's idea of an attractively de-ethnicized, vanilla WASP temperament...
...The tone of "Life Lessons" is ultimately at odds with the cautionary tale about self-deception it apparently wants to tell...
...The time, we are told, is "the late 18th century...
...Indeed, for the hardly satirical remark is symptomatic of this would-be lover's objectification of his love...
...Although the character of Baron Munchausen has been seen before in films (as the hero in both a Czech animated feature of the early '60s and one of Germany's biggest Nazi-era entertainments), Gilliam creates him anew...
...His live-in assistant, Paulette (Rosanna Arquette), wants out because she is too worried about her own career as an artist, and too uninspired romantically to return Lionel's affections...
...The mother-vs.-son jokes are funny but uncommonly vicious, and Allen has never written so self-punishing, in fact masochistic, a role for himself...
...They're too busy by-passing each other to ever really connect...
...One exchange made me gasp...
...Life Without Zoe, " directed and co-written (with his daughter Sofia) by Francis Coppola...
...The social climbing and career networking of Manhattan's art parasites are enacted with shameless bravura...
...His adventures are a tonic—wildly fantastic yet spiritaffirming—the work of a storyteller who prefers not fact but phosphorescence...
...This only in New York, Woody Allen...
...Such images of phallic vengeance are scattered throughout "Oedipus Wrecks...
...He's happiest (though for a hangdog like him the term is entirely relative) when he is slapping and smearing on paint, attacking his canvas with an aggressive frenzy...
...Still, Lionel harangues her as if no one else existed...
...To emphasize this, the recording used is by Mario del Monico, who possessed the butchest tenor of the last 30 years...
...Both are pretty well connected to external worlds of fellow painters, exhibitors and performance artists—the whole downtown, "Slaves of New York" scene...
...He begs for sexual attention and yet whimpers, "I just wanted to kiss your foot...
...He has come to reacquaint the citizens with his exploits involving various villains on earth, in space and under the sea, in order to arouse their courage and revive their taste for heroism...
...On Screen TAKES OF TWO CITIES BY JOHN MORRONE NEW York Stories is a highpowered revival of a narrative format that has been largely passé since the mid-'60s: the sequence film, with one or more directors contributing featurettes built around a unifying theme, star, author, or prop...
...It is almost a moot point who or what gets the worst deal in these stories, the audience that has been led to expect familiar urban eccentricities gently satirized, or the City, presented as an arena for artists, children and lovers to indulge themselves at the expense of others...
...Throughout most of "Life Lessons," the two circle each other like a pair of unevenly matched erotic gamesters, he whining, she declining...
...The ultimate joke in "Oedipus Wrecks" is how Sheldongets Mother to descend from on high and leave her public life...
...Justifiably, he would like his mother to "just disappear," and his wish seems to come true during a stage magician's act when Mrs...
...Once exhausted, he switches from Procol Harem's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" to something classical—yes, "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot, the movies' most overused bit of operatic shorthand for moments of male heterosexual yearning...
...The angst being explored here is clearly Lionel's...
Vol. 72 • March 1989 • No. 5
