Like padrone Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph sees filmmaking as jazz visualized, though where the former is interested in the genre's form, the latter is fascinated by its emotional intimations -- while Altman's camera charts the filmic equivalent of jazz's improvisatory slipperiness, Rudolph's takes the music's expressive unpredictability as a template for his characters' forlorn relationships. This yearners-on-the-prowl mosaic, Rudolph's first official feature (he disowns Premonition, his not-uninteresting 1972 horror effort), sets the pattern for his later, more stylized roundelays: people struggling to connect, flakiness as spiritual mobility, an ineffably, floatingly satirical romanticism. The City of Angels here is, like Chantal Akerman's Brussels, a metropolis of ephemeral connections -- all "daydreams and traffic," according to Sally Kellerman, one of the various Angelenas who pass through the hands of moody, beatnik-whiskered songwriter Keith Carradine in the course of the recording of an album. (The others include married socialite Geraldine Chaplin, photographer Lauren Hutton, maid Sissy Spacek, and music agent Viveca Lindfors.) The loneliness of the characters emphasizes Rudolph's sensibility to the transience of love, feelings in constant flux which can split or reconnect relationships with a single gesture. (In fact, the film's center lies in Chaplin's seesawing marriage to Harvey Keitel, which, upon Carradine's entrance, turns triangular and clarifyingly unstable.) If the film isn't nearly as successful as Choose Me or The Moderns, it's because, for all the mirrors and references to Garbo, the L.A. setting is too literal for the characters' stylized demands. (Rudolph also finds Richard Baskin's neurasthenic soundtrack moaning more hypnotic than I do.) Still, it has its place as the anti-Shampoo, its irony of a time stuck between effervescent '60s and sterile '80s. With Denver Pyle, John Considine, and Diahnne Abbott.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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