Cinema
Apres l'Amour ('15', Curzon Mayfair) Made in America ('12', selected cinemas)
French and forgettable
Mark Amory
Apres l'Amour is, as it sounds, all very very French. As the guests sing `Joyeuse Anniversaire' with admittedly the same fatuous and self-conscious smirk which the English wear on such an occasion, the cake is brought into the darkened room, candles flickering, but where is 30-year-old Lola (Isabelle Huppert) to blow them out? She has sneaked out for an illicit kiss in a car with boyish Tom, and the camera with a sense of inevitability pulls back so that we watch them through the rain splashing on the windscreen. Within minutes the man she lives with, David, a little older but attractively sure of himself, is also involved in a surreptitious meeting, but what's this? The children call him Papa', and so he is, but not married to their beautiful but later suicidal mother.
Soon the web of lies is tangled enough to ensnare everyone, many of them uttered on a telephone or overheard on an answering- machine. 'Of course I am alone,' says young Tom to his wife from a balcony over- looking the bay of Naples, but of course he is not, he is with Lola. When David says that he has not slept with his provocative secretary we have already heard her tell Lola about it; but Lola says nothing. All these poised, elegant people are attractive and seem rather intelligent in that they pause before they speak and then stare thoughtfully at nothing much. They have terrific sex together but develop no other characteristics. Lola is a novelist who uses her life in her books, which is a pity because we get quite enough of those in films anyway: the boring narrator who can be a successful device in novels is obtrusive in films, but cannot be written out when they are adapted because the plot falls to pieces without him. This is an original script, partly by the director, Diane Kurys, so there was no such pressure, but you do feel a little that Lola is her mouthpiece.
Not that she talks much, and nor does David, though he is accused of always meaning the opposite of what he says. This is usually 'as you wish' after some ultima- tum; perhaps that is the point and it is his method of getting his way. Though compli- cated the plotting is lucid and most agree- able to follow and there is none of the fake romanticism of, for instance, Claude Lelouche's Un homme et une Femme. It is quietly sincere, adult and completely for- gettable. At the end there is another birth- day party, again Lola slips out to . . . well, where does she go? It really does not mat- ter much. I'll give it 5.
Made in America is, on the other hand, curiously memorable. The contrived plot concerns a black girl who traces her sperm donor father and finds he is white. This is no surprise because Ted Danson is the male star and naturally, after the tradition- al opening hostilities, he falls for the female star, Whoopi Goldberg, playing the mother. Often I have felt that it was implausible when a character became famous and successful as an actor, and then reflected that it was not entirely unreason- able as in real life he had done just that. Here was a variation: how could pleasant, cool Danson take to this frightful, ugly woman, who did nothing but shout and slam doors ? Well, apparently in real life 'Is there room to swing a cat?' he left his wife saying she deserved millions of dollars for love of his co-star; so there.
While I was not laughing at the comedy it was dire, but when I was not crying at the pathos it was worse. I give it 3, for the vul- gar energy and for Danson, who rode a runaway elephant and even suggested lone- liness without being at all embarrassing. He became famous in Cheers, and the long- running television success is now a natural route to stardom. Like being typecast in a string of secondary pictures in the old days, it may give an actor a persona and a prac- tised ease that will stand him in good stead.
Previous page
