The viewer of Frank Perry's Play It As It Lays, based on the Joan Didion novel, and starring Tuesday Weld (as Maria) and Anthony Perkins (B.Z.), is placed in an extraordinary position. It's that of the time traveler. No one in l972, when the film was made, could see it from the privileged vantage point of the present. The landscape is Southern California, with priceless shots of winding freeways, themselves like telephone cables, neon everywhere and a piece of raw looking signage, an oversized letter T marking the spot where Maria gets an abortion. The film is at once pithily brilliant and monstrous. Tuesday Weld declares "existentially, I'm getting a hamburger" to her husband Carter (Adam Roark), in mockery of his pretentious use of language. The movie starts and ends with the institutionalized Maria framed by hedgerows a la Last Year At Marienbad. The relational triangle with Carter, Maria and B.Z., a producer, recalls Contempt. The movie is essentially an essay in sententiousness by the director of David and Lisa. The over the top histrionics work for Perry just as they must have for Didion who famously lifted "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," from Yeats' "Second Coming" as the title for her famous book of essays about California in the 60s. What can one say about the despair of wealthy Hollywood filmmakers? The movie evinces a mockery mixed with an ambivalent compassion. Play It As It Lays is currently playing at Film Forum.You can make a movie about nothingness, but nothing has to be something or no one will go to see it. Reviving Play It As It Lays is a wonderful curatorial sally, unearthing a masterpiece of vapidity from the era of Manson and the Sharon Tate murders that is at the same time enormously entertaining.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.