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The credits play while an up-angle traveling view of the Los Angeles Theatre's palatial chandeliers cranes down to the boxed candy at a concession stand, a characteristic joke. "Is there a movie in it?" Hot off a hit, the director (Donald Sutherland) faces the dreaded blank page. At the boarding gate with the missus (Ellen Burstyn) and kids, he sees a tarmac strewn with bodies loaded like luggage, the blocked mind works like that. The producer (Paul Mazursky) wants in with the hip kids, over lunch he reels off one mod project after another. (Huckleberry Finn as "Bert Brecht" musical: "Contemporary. Social comment. America is the shore. Coming down the raft as a black man. What's on the shore? Racism, fascism, police brutality, that's the shore...") One chases trends and rattles inside a new house or vanishes up his own ass, "ask your analyst." Mazursky's follow-up to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is perhaps the most honest snapshot of the American New Wave as modest talent inflated by personal neurosis and industry uncertainty. Godard's Weekend is strip-mined for an apocalyptic fantasia involving burning cars and tap-dancing swells on Hollywood Blvd. though 8½ is the model of choice, Fellini himself gets cornered by the protagonist at a Cinecittà editing room, playing testy but secretly glad to meet his Casanova. Amid imperious mamas and cavorting dwarfs, a Demy interlude after running into Jeanne Moreau at a bookstore. "I talk a lot of movie crap, don't I?" In contrast to the hollowly imitative dream sequences, the poignancy of the domestic drama building to a humble confession around a Paterian tree. Allen has his own try in Stardust Memories while Mazursky admits he's also not Truffaut (Willie & Phil). With Viola Spolin, Meg Mazursky, Glenna Sergent, and Andre Philippe.
--- Fernando F. Croce |