Marguerite Duras's gauzy, wispy autobiographical novel of forbidden passion in 1920s Indochina has been turned into this gauzy, wispy, pretty movie. March is a teenage French girl ferrying across the Mekong River on her way to boarding school after a visit to her colonialist family. Leung, a wealthy, indolent 32-year-old Chinese, watches from his car, transfixed by the girl's beauty.
Tentatively he offers her a ride to school in his limousine. She accepts, and their affair begins. From the start they are both aware of limitations. As a Caucasian, she could never be openly involved with a Chinese man; besides, she will soon return to France. He insists he could never marry a nonvirgin, and in any case he is betrothed. Hut while Leung is open in his love, March behaves as if it is a game, a way to make money for her mother and brothers who are living in poverty (he even pays off her brother's opium debts).
There is an erotic charge to the pair's first sexual encounter. (Later couplings look like something out of a Calvin Klein ad.) But as the affair progresses, there doesn't seem to be a buildup of passion, let alone love. Leung is just right as a man weakened by his wealth. March, a model, brings little to the role that makes credible her future as a great writer, a claim made for the character in a voice-over read by Jeanne Moreau. (R)
Jacques Dutronc
There has been a wide palette of cinematic Van Goghs. This superb, leisurely evocation, which concentrates on the last 67 days of the painter's life in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, is less a portrait of the artist than a portrait of the man. Director-screenwriter Maurice Pialat offers up a strong contrast to that most familiar Vincent—Kirk Douglas as a tortured genius in the 1956 Lust for Life. Dutronc's Vincent is not a depressed lunatic; instead, he is boorish, self-involved and a trial to all who know him.
No one comes off terribly well. Van Gogh's art-dealer brother Theo (Bernard Le Coq), usually viewed as an endlessly supportive saint, is here a faithless husband and no particular champion of Vincent. ("Deep down I don't like his painting," he tells his wife.) The doctor (Gérard Sety) who treats Vincent and whose daughter is first the painter's subject, then his lover, is viewed as an irredeemable hypocrite. Van Gogh makes little attempt to be art history; it is flavorsome, revisionist soap opera. (In French with subtitles) (R)
James Belushi, Lorraine Bracco, Tony Goldwyn
This is a thriller that will have half the audience giggling in disbelief while the other half is heading to the exits. Belushi plays a Palm Beach cop whose testimony in a case involving a dead hooker has marked him for death. Someone is sending him threatening quatrains sealed with a vermilion lipstick print. While he and partner Goldwyn scratch their heads, dead female bodies keep turning up, faces and lips smudged with that same shade of red. There's little to go on—no clear motive, no fingerprints—but lots of suspects: a guy with a vendetta against Belushi for putting his brother in prison; Belushi's sometime lover, Bracco, a widow who is financing the Slate Senate race of Belushi's brother; even Goldwyn and his wife.
Traces of Red is primarily notable for its piling on of absurdities and witlessly hilarious dialogue such as "It's my fault an innocent woman went to jail. Don't think I don't think about it every day of my life." (R)
Henry Jaglom, Nelly Alard, Melissa Leo
The Italian and California cities of the title both appear in this film, but the real locale is director Jaglom's deeply fissured, humorless psyche. Venice/Venice is about a small-potatoes American director who is at a film festival in Italy when a gorgeous young French journalist, Alard, throws herself at him and follows him back to California, where Jaglom is casting a movie about a director looking for someone to play his wife in a film.
Jaglom trashes a small battalion of women who are interviewed in pseudo-documentary footage. The women are given foolish lines that make them prattle about the contrast between movie romance and real life.
Despite all the blather about movie romance, there is no romantic payoff in this one. Nothing much happens, in fact, except for lots of ersatz philosophizing, with Jaglom musing about, among other things, the difference between "good narcissism" and "bad narcissism." (R)
Gérard Depardieu
What we have here is the French baroque Amadeus, involving two now obscure composer-violists of the 17th and 18th centuries, M. de Sainte Colombe and Marin Marais. The hulking Depardieu, a startling sight in powdered wig and elaborate ruffles, plays Marais, an ambitious musician whose eagerness to be a hit at Versailles costs him both his musical and spiritual souls. (The young Marais is played by Depardieu's 21-year-old son, Guillaume, who has his father's supple voice and strapping frame.) Jean-Pierre Marielle is Marais's reluctant teacher, the unworldly De Sainte Colombe, who sits alone into the night, communing with his instrument and the spirit of his dead wife.
This is a very slow movie with too many scenes of tormented men weeping over string instruments. Depardieu is without his customary verve, and Marielle's solemn performance is appropriately, if wearisomely, remote. (In French with subtitles) (Unrated)
Tate Donovan, Sandra Bullock
There should be a law that movies based on pop songs can't exceed the running time of their source material. In other words, this inane chronicle of nerds made irresistible by a magic elixir, based on the 1965 Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller tune, is about 93 minutes too long.
Donovan, a shy biochemist, is such a complete flop with women that he ends up going to a fortune-teller (Anne Bancroft) for counsel. She offers him a tonic that promises to make him the equivalent of catnip to the ladies, even if he is irresistible for only four hours at a stretch.
He's dubious, but when he and a stringy-haired colleague (Bullock) observe the potion's aphrodisiac effect on animals, they decide to test it on themselves. Bullock, who previously couldn't gel the tide to take her out, is suddenly enchanting every man in sight. Donovan has been transformed into Casanova incarnate. Love Potion has its amusing moments, but they don't quite add up to nine. (PG-13)
- Contributors:
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Ralph Novak,
- Tom Gliatto.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
