Cinema
While You Were Sleeping ('12', selected cinemas)
Butterfly Kiss ('18', selected cinemas)
Dreams about Mister Right
Mark Steyn
Amanda Plummer and Sandra Bullock are American movie gals of similar age though, with the sudden arrival of stardom, Miss Bullock has become evasive about hers. On balance, Miss Plummer's probably the better actress — so naturally she's wound up in a no-budget British movie fak- ing a Scouse accent with 17 tattoos and more chains than Houdini threaded through her pierced nipples. Miss Bullock, on the other hand, has a big, generous mouth, chipmunk cheeks, arched eyebrows, studiedly mussed hair and is holding down $6 million per picture. So she needn't worry about modelling chain links from the hardware store or taking Scouse elocution lessons just yet. Miss Plummer has traded glamour for working-class cred British-style — that's to say, dour, dowdy, depressing. Miss Bullock has become glamorous by peddling working-class cred Hollywood- style — that's to say, she wears baggy clothes and chews gum occasionally. Indeed, her bluecollar image mostly derives from the fact that, in last year's Speed, she drove a bus, and, in While You Were Sleep- ing, she works in the ticket booth at a Chicago subway station — a commitment to mass transit which should ensure, if nothing else, that she's Gavin Stamp's pin- up of the month.
While You Were Sleeping is a variation of Sleepless in Seattle, a sort of Comatose in Cook County. Lucy (Bullock) is a lonely bachelorette with no love life except for a dishy commuter (Peter Gallagher) who pushes his token in her slot every morning and whom she dreams of marrying one day — or, at least, speaking to. When he's mugged on the platform, she rushes to help and is assumed to be his fiancee. He's in a coma, so he can't enlighten anyone. At this point, enter Peter's brother (Bill Pullman), who's immediately suspicious of a fiancee no one's ever met before. He starts quizzing her on her knowledge of his sib- ling: 'Which one of the Three Stooges was Peter's favourite?"Curly', says Lucy. 'Ha!' snorts the brother. `Curly's everyone's favourite.' Inevitably, Lucy prefers a real live prince to the sleeping beauty, and gradually her dreams of Mister Right yield to dreams of Mister Right's more amusing brother. 'You're cheating on a vegetable,' says her boss.
One of the reasons the film is so sweet is that nothing is that funny — Bullock and Pullman, who always looks as if he's blink- ing back tears, share the kind of silly josh- ing that's irresistible if you happen to be falling in love, but doesn't count for much if you don't. It's to the credit of John Turteltaub, directing, that without any of the usual flim-flam — smart lines, stan- dards on the soundtrack — he manages to make his protagonists both utterly ordinary and extraordinarily romantic. Turteltaub turns standard boy/girl stuff that's cringe- making if you're not involved — klutzing about on the ice as a pretext for the first embrace — into a charming, inevitable sur- render to love.
Butterfly Kiss is a very elliptical title for a bog-standard God-the-awfulness-of-Eng- land picture. I'd have called it Psycho Lezzie Nutters On the Lam. Amanda Plum- mer plays Eunice and Saslcia Reeves plays Miriam, or Eu and Mi — you and me, ged- dit? I think it's meant to be about redemp- tion — butterfly emerging from chrysalis, that sort of thing. Less fancifully, it's a les- bian road movie — or if you prefer, since we must have genre classifications, a muff driving movie. Eu stomps up and down a northern by-pass burbling to herself, stab- bing petrol station attendants and clinking her nipple rings. Mi leads a quieter life wearing cardigans and sharing a council flat with her gran, until Eu broadens her horizons: 'That's the A588,' she points out from the roof of the tower block.
They hit the road to explore Sapphic pleasures and Morecombe leisure parks, battering assorted waitresses, truckers and salesmen along the way. Everything is filmed to look flat and washed out. Admit- tedly, much of Northern England is flat and washed out, but Saskia Reeves isn't, and she looks it here, her face lit to give her the same colour-drained texture as the pylons and the concrete and the sky and the motorway service stations and the Pot Noodles. Not only is Eu a psychotic and Mi a simpleton, but everyone they meet is either a moron or a pervert. In yet another sign of the picture's sureness of touch, instead of a perky Henry Mancini score or a Nat 'King' Cole theme song, there are Bjork and the Cranberries and other down- beat droners, adding an hypnotic mes- merising quality to the pierced noodles and Pot Nipples. As a directorial debut, Butter- fly Kiss will surely catapult Michael Winter- bottom into the pantheon of British film, right up there with Ken Loach.
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