On Screen
MORRONE, JOHN
On Screen WOMEN I? CRISIS BY JOHN MORRONE Four films concerning women that were presented at this fall's New York Film Festival are now scheduled for general release. Bertrand Blier's...
...Dellaplane unravels the triangle, and it is finally this unlikely idealist's bureaucratic punctiliousness, as he insists each body be named, each memento be sent home, that connects him to life in the face of war's oblivion...
...Go watch Colston and Lemon slug it out with a sad, surreal desperation, certifiably unlike any battle between sisters ever filmed...
...Lillian gradually finds the nerve to warm up to the mysterious charms of her lover by adopting Amy's style of meeting things head on...
...Straplessness" is Hare's metaphor for a woman's courage to be herself without outside help, with "no visible means of support...
...She does not even rise to the occasion at the finale, when the two sisters appear in strapless evening gowns at a benefit for medical-care workers striking against hospital cutbacks...
...Her surrender to a different personality, the gamble on love she takes, bewilders her when she discovers that a relationship between a man and a woman is not an equal rational exchange of "giving and getting...
...Whereas thin, wan Kay is so fragile even her dreams upset her, Sweetie's dream life is plastered all over her oily face...
...Meanwhile,—you guessed it—Amy finds herself pregnant and finally decides to shape up her wanton life and "see the pregnancy through...
...Unable to write a satisfactory ending for this film—a problem he also had with his 1986 Menage—he rewards Bernard for his messy (read "dumb") emotions by granting him an implausible dispensation from reason...
...Ganz' Raymond is Germanic gloom personified—a huge distraction in this very Anglo-American drama...
...It is ultimately a lesson Lillian learns in spades (maybe she could tell us if her memory is in her shoulders), but Brown's primness dogs her character...
...Regrettably, Hare takes this dynamism and makes it schematic and predictable...
...Instead, she makes a steady descent into madness that catches the family unprepared to cope with her destructive energy...
...When her fat, loud and wildly oversexed sister, known as Sweetie, makes a surprise visit, Kay's ploddingly comfortable married life is thrown into disarray...
...Audiences viewing Going Places groaned when Depardieu, then a sexually magnetic newcomer, threw an unwanted Miou-Miou into the river...
...Considering the film's theme of accepting our emotional limitations as well as the unfathomable nature of others, the expression on her face is far too inflexible...
...And there is nothing stupefied about Carole Bouquet's anguished portrayal of Florence, a wife literally driven into a frenzy by the incomprehensible revelation that she is too beautiful for her husband to want her...
...We give up on Lillian's quest to understand him...
...One of the festival's biggest surprises was Bertrand Tavernier's long (135 minutes) Life and Nothing...
...Indeed, Lillian's hospital not only corresponds to Redgrave's classroom, but the elusive, dishonest lover who enters her life also serves the same purpose as the suicidal visitor to Wetherby...
...Heroine Lillian (Blair Brown) is an American doctor who practices in London because she admires the orderliness of the Socialist medical system...
...Her style goes far beyond the merely eccentric...
...In tracking Lillian's progress toward emotional maturity, Strapless can be literate and engrossing...
...In Blier's male-dominated universe, men routinely turn women into objects and toss them aside, then discuss it all as if doing some academic explication de texte...
...Balasko, well-known on the French stage as playwright and comedienne, is a particularly adept scene-stealer...
...In this film, Kay (Karon Colston) and Dawn (Genevieve Lemon) are mythical figures of eternal sibling strife...
...The camera prowls incessantly, moving toward and backing away from the players to music by Schubert...
...Set in 1920 near the Atlantic French coast, its-main figure is a martinetish officer in charge of indentifying nameless men killed in the Great War and matching up grieving families with shelf upon shelf of abandoned belongings...
...Finally, we give up on Blair Brown, too...
...In love, as in her professional devotion to her patients, she plans to "see it through...
...Talentless at song and dance, Sweetie fancies herself a charmer whose big break into show business is imminent...
...That may certainly account for Depardieu's performance...
...Most Australians are skeptical of professional psychological help, and Sweetie reflects that cultural trait...
...And the casting seems perverse...
...For just as the labored turmoil felt by Strapless' ensemble compares unfavorably to the dour but poignant complexities of Wetherby, Brown is unequal to Vanessa Redgrave in both depth of temperament and range of expression...
...The two films are so much alike, however, that you could call the new offering a clone of the earlier one...
...He has said that he and the two leading ladies "acted in a hypnotic state" to neutralize their anxiety over roles they found emotionally consuming...
...Campion sometimes frames her distracted, neurasthenic characters as if the very ground the camera rested on were tilted, and the action tipped accidentally into view...
...In both movies Hare poises his selfpossessed protagonist on the brink of a shocking disruption in her life...
...Lillian's troubles begin when she meets Raymond (Bruno Ganz) in a Portuguese church while on vacation...
...Free of the director's usual labored style and affected pessimism, it is astonishingly moving...
...The clothes Lillian stands up in remain starched to the end...
...Lucky hero: He's off the hook, but his mistress is seduced and his wife is abandoned...
...To American audiences, therefore, Kay's attempt to keep her sister under control may itself seem dotty...
...Nevertheless, psychologists who have seen the film have remarked on its vivid, almost clinical representation of schizophrenic behavior...
...But Josiane Balasko is enrapturing as Colette, the secretary absorbed in the challenge of being Bernard's mistress...
...That outcome is not surprising...
...Imagine Mia Farrow and Brenda Vaccaro as sisters and you still haven't grasped the volatile chemistry between these two...
...Quiet, polite, vaguely romantic, he brings off the feat of jolting her out of her chosen solitude and throwing her clearly ordered mind into a tumult...
...But what appears at first to be an insanely impossible task becomes a personal crusade when Dellaplane encounters two women—the wealthy, haughty Irene (Sabine Azema) and the working-class Alice (Pascale Vignai)—unknowingly seeking the same dead soldier...
...A highly accomplished diagnostician, her respect for facts and procedures masks her dislike of emotionalism—she tends bodies with all the severity that Vanessa Redgrave's schoolteacher educated minds in Wetherby...
...Sixteen years later Depardieu appears hapless (surely not Blier's intention), his usually powerful screen presence eclipsed by Balasko and Bouquet...
...The heroines' parts are cluttered with meticulously cross-referenced Get-andGive speeches and declarations about Seeing-It-Through that badly try one's patience...
...Lillian's sister Amy (Bridget Fonda), is another threat to her tidily arranged existence...
...The sexism, moreover, is blithely exercised...
...Since Bernard seems numbed by his obsession, we watch the reactions of both wife and mistress to the bizarre shift in the laws of attraction...
...Campion's real artistic achievement, though, has been to dramatize the mortal conflict between life-draining and lifeexploding personalities...
...Kay, an enervated despairing creature, takes meditation classes in her futile search for "quiet...
...On the verge of being seduced, Lillian protests that she "doesn't get" this Continental gentleman, yet she is tempted enough to investigate...
...Little by little Hare robs Lillian of her defenses as neatly as Hitchcock stripped the jewelry from Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat...
...His slippery performance makes his character so unknowable that locating Raymond's center ultimately becomes a pointless task...
...Perhaps, though, the latter aperçu accurately reflects Blier's thinking...
...At one point in the story she observes, "A woman's memory is in her shoulders...
...Although I don't have a clue as to what that means in the context of the plot, such as it is, she deserves kudos for the way she delivers the nuttiest of Blier's epigrams...
...she seems to chart a strange parallel universe whose quirky emotional realities intersect only slightly with our own...
...The actresses actually do not seem to have much rapport, adding to the tension between their characters...
...Shot in gray widescreen expanses, Life and Nothing But is austere but deeply felt, hidden moments plucked from an epic canvas of postwar European sorrow...
...Dellaplane (Phillipe Noiret) is the military man who has to make sure that the ledgers tally and the number of unclaimed bodies decreases daily...
...Love clobbers you" and "The dumb things in life are best" are, unfortunately, two typical examples...
...At the same time, the fallout from her romantic confusion affects her attitude toward her work...
...She finds she cannot give enough to " see through" a terminal patient gripped by pain, and thus feels robbed of the satisfaction she had always gotten in return for her dedication...
...As Bernard, a man so hopelessly smitten with his plain, fleshy secretary that he ignores his ravishing wife, Gerard Depardieu looks doped...
...But the viewer often pays dearly for Hare's intelligence...
...Blier has once again conceived a triangular tale of erotic tension in the style that has marked most of his work since his 1973 Going Places, but here a kind of fuzzy charm rather than logic provides the momentum...
...Strapless is playwright David Hare's first film as writer-director to be shown in this country since Wetherby in 1985...
...Bertrand Blier's TooBeautiful for You, which was the Festival's opening night selection, is a wry comedy with philosophical pretensions that tries to explore the mystery of desire...
...Brown and Fonda give arresting performances as sisters who just don't click—one being a tight-lipped WASP, the second a reckless youngster...
...They may have the last laugh on actor and director when they see Too Beautiful for You...
...Balanced on the skateboard of a plot that never arrives at a resolution, Colette and Florence trade Gallic epigrams—in combat and mutual commiseration—about the nature of love and passion...
...Sweetie is the first feature film done by that unclassifiable Australian talent Jane Campion, whose short works have been seen previously at the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films...
Vol. 73 • January 1990 • No. 1
