Cinema

That's Life (15', Cannon Shaftesbury Avenue)

Mortal glue

Hilary Mantel

Etcrating Hollywood for self- indulgence is — as people say nowadays like slagging off the Pope for being a Catholic. Still, there must be people around who expect intellectual rigour and purity of intent, because this innocuous film is set fair to be the most berated of the Year.

Directed by Blake Edwards, and filmed at his house at Malibu Beach, it stars his friend Jack Lemmon and his wife Julie Andrews. They play Mr and Mrs Harvey Fairchild; the Fairchilds' three children are played by Blake Edwards's daughter, Julie Andrews's daughter and Jack Lemmon's son. There is a part for Jack Lemmon's Wife, and a part for Blake Edwards's dog. These congenial and no doubt economical arrangements have put the critics in a rage. You would think that Mr Edwards had murdered his friends, instead of simply

employing them.

Perhaps also it is the title which enrages. Who is Blake Edwards, to tell us what Life is? It is true that Harvey is not Everyman.

He is an architect, wealthy, lucky; he is a member of the panicking classes. What panics him particularly is the approach of his 60th birthday, which his family has been so insensitive as to decree a cause for celebration.

On the eve of his birthday weekend he arrives home in a state of near-collapse.

His car has broken down, and he has been forced to walk a mile and a half; frustrated by the video-security at his own gate, he stumbles though lawn-sprinklers like a man negotiating a minefield. The fruits of prosperity have turned sour, we see, and the signals of his success are now signalling something else.

He wants to be Frank Lloyd Wright; but that is not his only problem. He has a pain in his toe, and a digestion that does not allow him strawberries or caviare. His clients want their load-bearing walls to be made of glass, and maybe a painting on the ceiling 'like the Sistine Chapel'. When a client offers adultery by the ocean, he finds he is not up to it. 'This body is falling apart,' he wails. His real problem is the `7,000 birthday cards' with the cute verses; old age confronts him in a society devoted to surface and gloss, where his daughter's pregnancy counts as a disfigurement, and dignified women of his wife's age bare the concave thighs of anorexic girls.

To his wife Gillian he relates the frustra- tions of his day in one long, beautifully paced rant; a monster of self- preoccupation, he continues it at a res- taurant, wrestling with an enormous lob- ster which does not seem quite dead. Meanwhile his wife is a little hoarse, and caresses her throat, and shows no inclina- tion to eat up her soup.

Whenever Julie Andrews has departed from her domestic-angel roles, she has found herself in embarrassments like Victor/Victoria, and here she is wisely cast to type; it would be reading too much into

the film to suspect satiric intent. It seems,

though, that Hollywood is killing her by inches. In Duet for One she had multiple sclerosis; here, we already know, she has a `small granular lesion' in her throat, has just been for a biopsy, and is sweating out the weekend until she learns whether it is malignant. She doesn't tell the family she has to keep them happy — but of course when the children arrive they prove to be as miserable and self-absorbed as Harvey.

To her role as Gillian, Miss Andrews has adopted a strange voice, clipped English vowels alternating with an exaggerated down-home drawl, in which she dispenses gems of consolation: 'Life's so short . . . `Pregnancy's the most important thing a woman can do.' It is really a miracle that a doctor was the first to slit her throat. She stares into mirrors a good deal, perhaps to divine why she is such a doormat; to indicate her distracted condition, she slaps on lipstick as if she were painting a wall, and applies her mascara as if she were raking a garden pond. Meanwhile, party night draws on. 'I've never seen you so unglued,' she tells Harvey.

Blake Edwards has directed 33 films now, and perhaps he is bored with it. There is not much direction here, in the ordinary sense of the word. The set pieces fizzle out, and the hovering camera seems to be waiting for something that never happens. But Jack Lemmon's performance is perfectly judged — the corrugated brow, the twitching hands, the consuming inabil- ity to say what he means or mean very much at all. This is an intelligent and bleak comedy, which needs listening to. If it isn't up to its theme, if it's only a nod and wink at mortality — well, that's nothing to get unglued about.