Cinema
Coming through
Duncan Fallowell
Rich and Famous ('X', selected cinemas)
A few weeks ago we had the spectacle of ..Dudley Moore daring to go off and make it on the West Coast of America. Now it is Jacqueline Bisset's turn for con- sideration, although she slipped away long before he did and has taken longer to creep back on us in the guise of international star. It is still difficult to believe that the little girl from Berkshire is now 37 years old and the closest thing in the 1980s to Elizabeth Tay- lor. No television. No theatre. Pure cellu- loid: simultaneously close up and far away.
Ms Bisset is not only the star but also the co-producer of this film and yes, when she appeared on Parkinson (BBC1) recently, she did manage to make a leopardette cat- suit seem a sensible, producer-type thing to wear. With make-up designed to give the impression that none was being worn at all, and plenty of tousled hair, Ms Bisset is identifying still with Liz Hamilton, the quasi-intellectual novelist she plays in Rich and Famous, or maybe the two just have similar ways. This style is called Post- Analysis Throwaway Chic and involves wearing very expensive, slightly eccentric things with an air of total indifference bordering on hauteur, as if one's non- bedroom time were divided exclusively bet- ween the kitchen sink and the, Ritz. It is an admirable way to take on the Eighties, and it is an inspiration to find at least one per- son who is more or less prepared for anything the decade wishes to throw at her.
As a woman she is very beautiful and as an actress she is fine. She is extremely good at pretending to be natural and suggests that, while being intelligent enough to have problems, there are very few blocks bet- ween her and her orgasm. Ms Bisset's talent is especially for 'Come Through' parts, as in 'It was hell, I've changed, but I've come through, and I'm wiser, deeper, more at- tractive, and much richer for it.' She has been reborn, it seems — but only lately, so that she hasn't had time to harden into a know-all, she is still soft in the knowledge of suffering. This is what makes her shy smirk so attractive. Complacency, like ice beginning to form, from the, banks of a river, has not yet closed over her soul.
Ms Bisset's main weakness is her voice. It lacks the sculptural identity which im- presses a performance on the memory. Those pulpy, chewed 'rrr's — like Diana Quick's — may keep her from the summits of her profession. A weak voice can be im- proved. But not by a mid-Atlantic accent. Hers gets worse and worse and one is reminded of the noises made by the Terrible Twangs (Auden and Isherwood). We all know that actors are too easily influenced, this is one of the horrors of the business, but Ms Bisset must avoid undermining her gravitas as an individual, as yet insufficient for truly great stardom, through the con- fused muddle of her speech.
The divided self is not something Candice Bergen has much time for, especially in this film. She plays Merry Noel Blake, Liz Hamilton's best friend from college days, the other half of the friendship which this film portrays, the commercial best-selling half. Some have seen Ms Bergen's boisterous performance as a parody and it is true that most of the film's intentional comedy is in her court. But anyone who has encountered a southern belle on the go and on the get, the inexorable hair-do, the incontrovertible smile, the Amazonian determination of perfect grooming, the cold intrusion of the will into places where it does not belong and the excessive passion revealed in vulgarities of taste, knows that if anything Ms 'Ice' Bergen errs on the side of kindness.
This is not particularly a woman's film. But there is something odd about it nonetheless. For a start, it is frequently cor- ny. Liz's post-coital conversations with her younger man (Hart Bochner — butch, sen- timental, horribly enlightened and decided- ly dim) make rather embarrassing use of T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Yeats. But as jaded read-it-all Europeans we forget that for Americans writing is still a glor- ious, dramatic and renewable enterprise.
Secondly, the narrative is episodic, somewhat unbalanced. On occasion the script completely fails to connect motive with action, and the director George Cukor cannot decide if he wants the film to be straight comedy or just straight. At 82 years he is the oldest man ever to direct a mainstream Hollywood picture and since he should now be undergoing his second youth, it comes as a surprise to discover how hopeless he is at directing young peo- ple. Liz Hamilton has a bit of a passion for them so it is unfortunate that these en- counters turn out to be so wooden, despite the occasional 'fuck' and some decorative nudity. Ms Bisset's body is pleasantly freckled and .not unduly coy but again the gentlemen have only their buttocks and pec- torals — it occurs to me that this is a direct, subconscious transference to male nudity of the American male's obsession with 'tit 'n' arse'.
Strangest of all, the friendship isn't par- ticularly credible and as if they agree, Jac- queline and Candice spend most of the time tearing each other to bits. Perhaps friend- ships have been founded on worse than reciprocal disgust — but never merely on that, surely?
However, by some sort of miracle, the film refuses to fall apart. One keeps in- terested. And I think that is because it is a timely film. At the moment, everywhere you look there is nostalgia and suffocation in the past. The only alternative to that ap- pears to be escapist futurism. So it comes as a slight shock and a pleasure to discover a film that belongs without any great fuss to 1982.
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