TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042291/0422420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 84

All Stressed Up, No Place to Go


Two films put traveling couples in strange and tantalizing fixes

By RICHARD SCHICKEL


    Feeling a little pressed these days? Bills piling up,
recession getting you down? Then you may find it perversely
consoling to reflect on the desperate straits of Jake and Tina
(John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell) in The Object of Beauty.

    American Express has just turned his Gold Card into dross,
their posh London hotel is pressing them to settle a steadily
mounting bill, and the future of his cocoa futures is dim
indeed; the beans are rotting on the docks somewhere in South
America, the result of a highly inconvenient strike.

    Their only resource is a small Henry Moore sculpture, the
title's "object of beauty," and it is their prime subject of
debate as they whine and dine. She owns it. He needs it. She
thinks it would be nice to fake a theft and enter an insurance
claim. He is in favor of a forthright sale. While Jake and Tina
talk, their hotel maid acts: she makes off with the Moore.

    Desperately poor and also disabled (she is deaf and cannot
speak), Jenny (Rudi Davies) is the only character in the film
who is actually worthy of this exquisitely enigmatic art. For
as she finally puts it in a note, it speaks to her, and despite
her limitations, she can hear what it is saying. To complete
the film's moral balance, she has a brother who is the only
figure totally insensate to the value, financial or spiritual,
of the sculpture. To him it's just something to try to fence for
a few pounds sterling and toss on a junk heap when he fails.

    The film, written and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg,
may seem schematic in the retelling. But on the screen it is
charged with curious ironies and the edgy energy of barely
suppressed panic. Its temporarily grounded jet-setters may seem
rather remote figures. But in the playing they aren't as
sophisticated as they would like to seem; and as they paint
themselves deeper and deeper into a corner, one cannot help
relating to them. Debt -- especially debt run up in pursuit of
pleasures beyond one's means -- is, after all, one of the
central subjects of middle-class life, and also one that movies
determinedly avoid. Even if this movie were less nuanced in its
pursuit of the forbidden topic, it would be welcome. But dry,
clear and finely tuned, The Object of Beauty is a treasurable
chamber piece.

    The Comfort of Strangers also features an un married
couple, Colin and Mary (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson),
resident at a hostelry outside their native land and facing up
to yet another common middle-class problem. Their setting is
Venice; their issue is the joylessness of sex. But the mood,
well established by Paul Schrader's direction and Harold
Pinter's elliptical screenplay, is one of languid menace. It is
personified by Christopher Walken, excellent as Robert, whose
psychopathic weirdness simultaneously attracts and repels the
couple. And mysteriously energizes them. In his sexuality there
is political metaphor. He is an undeclared fascist, hiding the
threat of self-destruction under the lure of self-actualization.
The movie is full of unsolved mysteries. Why does Robert choose
to stalk this pair? What motivates his sadism, which is of both
the delicately patient and suddenly violent varieties? Nice
questions, which are left to resonate in our minds.

    Sometimes its air of doomy portent is stifling. But
equally often it turns into a kind of Creepshow for grownups,
teasing the mind with its enigmas, bedazzling the eye with its
imagery. Finally, like its villain, it draws one into a very
oddly woven web.