BEFORE: And this time Ellen Burstyn carries over from "How to Make an American Quilt" as I start a mini-chain with some of the more classic films, recorded from TCM in the past few months.
THE PLOT: A man and woman meet by chance at a romantic inn over dinner. Although both are married to others, they find themselves in the same bed the next morning, and they agree to meet on the same weekend each year.
AFTER: My topic tonight concerns cheating, but not the extra-marital kind. I'm talking about the kind of cheating a filmmaker can pull off to sway opinion in a certain way. Since a film tends to reflect the cultural mores of the time period that produced it, you would expect a film made in the swingin' 1970s to have something of a lax attitude toward faithfulness - but this is a whole different animal.
By depicting the one day each year that a cheating couple meets (which happens to be in February, appropriately enough), over the course of 26 years, we get to see the upside of the affair, without any of the potential negatives. That's more than a bit biased, that's cheating. Is the physical nature of an affair rewarding? Yeah, probably. Is the intimacy achieved between the two a positive? Possibly - the old "my spouse doesn't understand me" chestnut. But where is the guilt, the deception, the unfairness to their spouses? There are some references to going to confession, but any second thoughts or crying jags are kept off-camera.
So the affair lives in the unreality of "vacation time", since their relationship takes place only once a year at a little resort in upstate California. He's an accountant that flies in from Connecticut to do bookkeeping for a winery, and she drives up for a retreat instead of celebrating her mother-in-law's birthday. They both learn to do some handy compartmentalizing, turning on their libidos for a day or a weekend, and then putting it back into a box so they can go back to their lives.
At the same time, since we check in on them every five years or so, there's a commentary on the changing social mores of the early 1950's to the mid-1960's and finally 1977. At times they are miles apart politically, when he represents the establishment but she's a hippie chick, having gone back to school at Berkeley. This seemed like quite a stretch, for a mother of three to go back to school and suddenly dress like an 18 year old again. Besides, I thought the hippie motto included "Drop out", not "audit some college courses"? Again, this is a form of cheating, changing a character so drastically in order to set up the conflict between liberal and conservative - which doesn't seem to get in the way of them having their annual sex, though. And for the same woman to be a successful business mogul just a few years later - give me a break.
Did stuff like this happen? I guess it's possible, you do sometimes hear about people who have long-term affairs and entire second families, but it just seems very, very unlikely. It's clearly based off a stage-play - the entirety of the film is set in this one-room cabin, and a bit in the resort's dining room. Drop a few new props into the room between scenes to denote the passage of time, and then you can concentrate instead on your socially relevant dialogue... But since we never see their spouses or children, our attention is always on the couple before us, and that's meant to garner our sympathies. That's more filmic cheating, it's manipulation by editing.
I wonder if people who work at resorts and hotels have just about seen it all. Do they look at the couples having wonderful times and think, "Sure, they're married - just not to each other!" And do they keep seeing the same customers over and over, with different partners?
Also starring Alan Alda (last seen in "Wanderlust")
RATING: 4 out of 10 bedsheets
"Amadeus" moves and stages the story so far beyond its source that nobody would ever know that it started out as a stage play. "12 Angry Men" and "Glengary Glenn Ross" all of the signs of a transplant -- just a few sets, no exteriors, actors intensely ACT-innnngggg -- but it's done so well that you're never really aware of those things.
ReplyDelete"Same Time, Next Year" isn't up at that level. I wish I could see it on the stage (with comped tickets, at a theater that's no more than a thirty minute drive away). The movie seems so clunky. It gets locked into its structure ("...and at the start of every act, it's like ten years later, and we get to see how these characters and their attitudes towards life have changed"). In doing so, the writer loses sight of the one really interesting aspect of this story:
What kind of people cheat on their spouses exactly once a year, and with the same person?
Weird, isn't it? If there's a defensible reason for cheating on a life-partner, I can't imagine what it would be. But I can understand why someone would break a window and steal a laptop bag out of a car: "I can trade that for drugs." I don't understand why these characters would be conducting this kind of an affair.
It seems like this story would be way more direct and effective if the entire story took place during just one of these liaisons, and we were left to learn about these two people and what they think they're getting out of this.
As is? It feels like a series of Big Scenes as opposed to a story.
"We've just boinked. Shall we now have an argument? That Obie award isn't going to win itself."
"Mmm. How about this: I'll let you have a nice two-page hunk of dialogue in which you accuse me of having a myopically-conservative worldview that causes me to view my own children with suspicion. If you'll let me dress in denim in the next act and have a two-page hunk in which I make a case for the breakdown of society in general."
"Deal."
"Deal. Gimme twenty minutes to change into a three-piece suit and comb my hair real weird."