ARTS
Ordinary life
Peter Ackroyd
Head Over Heels ('A', Screen on the Hill) I could hear the cliches echoing through my head as I watched it — at last, a love story without false sentiment; a film which evokes the texture of ordinary living; how surprising, how refreshing, that a woman should have directed, produced and written a film in which the man is, for once, a kind of hero; etcetera, etcetera.
And yet Head Over Heels is like that — it seems so artless that it demands the most artless responses. It is a 'love story' and it works precisely because it follows the familiar but bewildering pattern of such stories. Man loves woman, and woman loves man, sort of, but feels guilty about leaving husband ... It would sound like a computer print-out, if it were not for pieces of dialogue which spring unimpeded from a sense of ordinary human weakness: 'Why would you choose someone who loves you too little over someone who loves you too much?' he asks her. 'Because I feel less of a fraud,' she replies. Of course one cannot imagine Pyramus and Thisbe, Heldise and Abelard, or even Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy uttering such lines. They would not have understood what they meant. They would probably have laughed at them.
In that sense, Head Over Heels is a purely contemporary love story. 'Love' itself is impossible to define, and indeed often experience, because its nature depends entirely upon the culture from which it springs: courtly love and romantic love, for example, were the crystal mirrors in which our otherwise puzzled ancestors were able to see themselves. And this film represents the 'love' of our own time, a love which constantly impresses upon us the awkward, baffling, hesitant and somewhat disembodied nature of our own experience. The mood of the film is low key, the action somewhat confused and the dialogue tending towards the casual and improvisational. Throughout the narrative there is a sense of the isolation and separateness of human beings, who may have the grace to be ironic about their plight but are still caught in their hopeless attachment to some notion of human companionship: 'I don't feel sorry for him,' one person says of another, 'At least he has someone to care for.'
All of this would be negligible, however, without the central character, Charles, the lover, played here by John Heard. He is a modest and immediately likeable actor who has the gift of looking as though everything is happening to him for the first time. It is sometimes painful to watch him on the screen: 'hooked' on the presence of the girl as if he were a plant which needs the sun, clowning in order to hide his unhappiness, continually insecure and trying quite unsuccessfully to conceal that fact. The girl Laura, played here by Mary Beth Hurt, is a most appropriate object for his love, with the kind of confused pleasantness which can act as a transparent vessel in which he pours himself. When she leaves him, he starts building a model replica of her house, complete with tiny dolls which he moves around as the day progresses. It is touching, and of course also absurd.
But the merit of the film is that it actively reconciles these states. If it represents the sadness of human longing, it also represents the comedy of human manners when faced with even the most extreme human events. Charles's mother, played here by Gloria Graham as though she were still a teenager, knows nothing about her son's frustrations. She is slightly crazy, signalling each nervous breakdown with a compulsion to eat her way through bundles of laxatives. For Christmas dinner, she wears a black evening dress with white plimsolls. 'Shall I bring in the turkey, Mom?' Charles asks. 'There is no turkey, Charles.' There is in fact, no food. She has played a little joke upon her family. But, despite the comic possibilities which Gloria Graham offers to the audience, like Salome, upon a platter, it is clear that she too is both isolated and frightened of her isolation.
It is this modulation between comedy and pity which is the film's chief strength. It is, you might say, on the side of life: the only crime which the film might be said to condemn is that of cold-heartedness. I would say, at the risk of being described as sexist, that this is because it is both directed and written by a woman, Joan Micklin Silver. In her intuition of mood, as well as her tact in dealing with the odd and wayward life of the emotions, one senses a more feminine, less deterministic sense of life than is common in pictures of this kind. She creates an image of ordinary life without draping it with the chains of 'meaning' and 'purpose'; she sees in diurnal events the baffled movement of the soul. In that sense, more than any other, Head Over Heels is a love story.
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