Film
More Like A Millstone
B
by Joel Weinberg
Fool for Love Directed by Robert Altman Cannon Films, Inc.
y its very nature, Fool for Love is a cinematic milestone. It's the first Sam Shepard play to be transferred to film and Shepard is one of our greatest living. dramatists. High hopes for this project are further aroused by Shepard's well-documented fear of selling out to Hollywood (Angel City), which presumably accounts for his withholding the movie rights to his plays until now. Fool for Love boasts a screenplay by Shepard as well as his participation as an actor. And Robert Altman, a specialist in bringing stage works to the screen, is the director. Altman's filmed plays (Come Back to the 5 é Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Streamers, and Secret Honor) are masterpieces of the genre.
It comes as a surprise, therefore, to discover that Fool for Love is a muddled movie version of the Off-Broadway play that won raves for its electrifying performances. Fool for Love suffers from too much of a good thing-namely Shepard, whose presence overwhelms and limits the proceedings.
The play recounts the bizarre ongoing affair between Eddie (Shepard), a cowboy, and May (Kim Basinger), a wispy dishwater blond. Eddie tracks down the incognito May, who wants to end their association. The ensuing psychodrama shows the couple to be worthy opponents who do their best to destroy each other.
The action is set in a dilapidated motel near the Mohave Desert run by a nameless eccentric (Harry Dean Stanton). This old geezer turns out to be Eddie's and May's father. In a final attempt to rid herself of Eddie, May entertains a gentleman caller, Martin (Randy Quaid), who watches in stunned amazement as the drunken family members wash their dirty linen in public.
The initial problem with Fool for Love is that Altman doesn't contribute much of his unique visual magic to the film. He has directed Shepard's screenplay reverentially, as if each word were gospel and could not be reimagined. Altman's opening up of the drama-in essence, he illustrates the character's monolgues with corresponding vignettes--dissipates most of the play's original energy. Instead of letting the actors emote on camera, Altman uses their words merely as voice-overs. Altman's work, although competent, is a bewildering retreat from his previous theatrical adaptation.
Perhaps Altman was under pressure to direct as straightforwardly as possible in order to reach a commercial audience. Or maybe Altman didn't want to tread on the exalted toes of playwright/screenwriter/actor Shepard, who, as it turns out, is largely to blame for Fool for Love's failure.
A victim of his "media darling" status, Shepard evidently believes the movie star hype he's received. Shepard seems to think that all he must do to fill out a role is look lean and rugged. He coasts along on rudimentary acting technique, as he's done in all his other films. Shepard's one-dimensional performance manages to sap the humor-his humor-from the first half of the film.
Worse, Shepard's acting throws the entire movie out of balance. His emotions don't build from scene to scene, nor does his Eddie develop as a character. Most detrimentally, Shepard fails to establish an intimate bond with Basinger, leaving her stranded and creating a void where the heart of the movie 38 NEW YORK NATIVE/DECEMBER
C
MOTEL
should be.
Although she could be accused of impersonating Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces, right down to the twangy country accent, Basinger makes a valiant effort and at least keep her scenes afloat. Quaid gives a confident, funny performance, but his appearance isn't enough to prevent the picture from dissolving into a tedious battle of the sexes.
Sam Shepard in Fool for Love.
Fool for Love ends with dual monologues in which Eddie and May describe how they fell in love as teenagers knowing that they shared the same father. The handling of these passages is Altman's only adventurous work here. In the coinciding vignettes, Altman shows events that are slightly different from those the siblings recall. This disjunction is a lyrical means of visualizing Shepard's
Gilding the Lily
by Ed Sikov
The Horse of Pride Directed by Claude Chabrol
A Nicole Jouve Interama Release Film Forum
C
laude Chabrol's new film, The Horse of Pride, is a lyrical ode to Breton peasant life based on the bestselling autobiographical novel by PierreJakez Helias. Lushly produced and crafted with gentle self-assurance, the film takes an intimate look at the period of French history when the life and culture of the Breton peasantry fell into a decline from which it could never recover. A story of cultural bravery and personal honor, The Horse of Pride is almost encyclopedic in its concern for peasant customs, and Chabrol renders them with a particularly lovely sense of visual detail.
The Bretons' tenacity and fierce sense of personal and familial dignity may have been enough to withstand centures of hardship along the coast of the harsh Atlantic, but the shifting ecomonics of a rapidly industrializing Europe and the devastating consequences of the First World War brought Breton provincialism to a swift end. Chabrol and screenwriter Daniel Boulanger, apparently following the tone of Helia's book, treat the demise of Breton folk life with a nostaglic, even reverential attitude. Told from Helias's point of view, the film begins with the marriage of his parents, a three-day feast that culminates in a peculiar soup-eating cere23-29, 1985
mony in their bed, a kind of Murphy bed in the form of a chiffarobe.
Chabrol's Brittany is suffused with an otherworldly quality, and a sense of ethnographic ingenuousness emanates not only from the director's minute interest in Breton
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elusive sense of reality. Up to this point, all the relationships are presented in an overly literal manner. These mesmerizing confessions are the closest the film comes to capturing Shepard's ambiguity, his most surreal and unsettling trait. Shepard's haunting enigmas are otherwise missing from the movie. Their absence is what makes Fool for Love so disappointing.
folkways but also from the film's lighting design and even from the film stock itself. Crisper looking than The Return of Martin. Guerre, another recent French peasant costume drama, The Horse of Pride nonetheless echoes the earlier film's visual splendor. Like Martin Guerre, Chabrol's vignettes of the countryside can afford this luxury of beauty because all of the bitter, thudding realities of peasant life have been cleaned away. Although the narrator repeatedly refers to the extraordinary poverty under which his family suffered, the film's production design consistently belies his words by revealing a ceaseless assortment of glorious costumes. It is remarkable, moreover, that anyone could take such a dewy-eyed view of an era when women were forced to wash clothes in a well, when farming was literally a matter of backbreaking physical labor, and when the exhausting work of a full day yielded no more than brute sustenance.
There is a scene midway through The Horse of Pride that ought to push Chabrol's nostalgia to the breaking point, Helias's mother, having recently given birth, must wrap herself in a mourning cape and hood and scurry off to church to be ritualistically disinfected from the germ-filled sin of childbirth; her neighbors shield their eyes from her, lest they too be soiled. A more horrific image of peasant backwardness could scarcely be imagined, yet Chabrol treats it with tender, glowing respect. It's a shocking moment of cultural truth, but Chabrol's treatment makes it incomprehensibly sweet, and more than a little silly.