John Erman | An Early Frost / 1985 [TV film]

without even a kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman (screenplay, based on a story by Sherman Yellen), John Erman (director) An Early Frost / 1985 [TV film]

 

1985 was an important year for the LGBTQ community in connection to the recognition of the AIDS crisis. That was the year, if you recall, that Rock Hudson died of the disease, not only shocking many everyday Americans with the revelation that Hudson was a gay man, but that anyone might contract and die from the acquired immune deficiency syndrome, including Hollywood’s hunkiest leading male actor.

      What is usually described as the first major AIDS film, Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies premiered late that year, as well as the first TV drama that dealt with the subject, John Erman’s An Early Frost which reached more than 34 million people when it was broadcast on November 11, a month after Hudson’s death.

 

    The film, written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman (who later created Queer as Folk), took over two years in development with 14 rewrites. And, alas, the film reveals many of its numerous committee-like decisions.

     Unlike Buddies, which featured a more radicalized and almost indigent victim of the disease, Erman’s work was pitched almost entirely to the bourgeois and upper-middle-class aspirants, similar to the figures in the next year’s excellent Parting Glances, 1989’s Longtime Companion and Philadelphia of 1993. As Erman himself admits, his audience as he saw it was his working-class Aunt Myrtle, “so that she will realize that gay people are just as good as anybody else.”

     As in Philadelphia, An Early Frost’s poster boy for AIDS Michael Pierson (Aidan Quinn) is a handsome well-to-do lawyer with a basically loving upper middle-class family—Nick (Ben Gazzara) and Katherine (Gena Rowlands), sister Susan (Sydney Walsh), and a grandmother played by the wonderful Sylvia Sidney—who lives in a basically monogamous relationship with an equally handsome lover Peter Hilton (D. W. Moffett) in a spectacular Chicago apartment that today would certainly be worth millions. The Pierson family home was represented by a house in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, a real-estate agent’s dream.

      At large, this strategy is understandable. If people like Hudson and the handsome character Quinn plays can contract AIDS, then anyone might. And, put together, what all the films I mention above make clear is that people of wealth were just as subject to the pernicious disease as others. And you have to give the director credit for his casting choices given the original desires by NBC executives who envisioned Michael’s family members to include, as Jay Blotcher reported in The Advocate, “Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn as the mother, Gregory Peck as the father, and Helen Hayes as the grandmother.” The nervous network nellies, one suspects, might even have imagined Norman Rockwell as the set designer. So the Leave It to Beaver-like Brentwood house is not as absurd, in hindsight, as it might first have appeared. 

     At the time of this TV film’s shooting, although a Gallup poll showed that 95% of the US population knew what AIDS was, the majority still perceived it as a gay disease. Accordingly, although it focused on a gay man and his family, Erman clearly saw his film clearly as an educational tool, and accordingly took its character, who had remained closeted regarding his family and was evidently for too much of a workaholic to have kept up with information that the gay community itself had long before perceived, that although it the US and Europe it had first stricken predominantly gays, in Africa and some Asian countries it was a heterosexual disease as well, and in the US it had hit hemophiliacs, drug addicts, others who had had blood transfusions, and was rapidly beginning to enter the lives of heterosexual men and women and even their children.

      In an attempt to maintain authenticity Erman had Quinn undergo an AIDS test which Blotcher describes: “The doctor noted that the actor’s lymph glands were swollen and his white blood cells elevated.” Quinn remembers, “And I thought, Jesus Christ! Do I have AIDS? Is this some bizarre trick of fate that here I am doing this groundbreaking thing and I actually have it myself? The actor lived through a couple of days of mental agony—'I was kind of freaking out’—before his HIV antibody test came back negative.”

      When Quinn’s character, Michael finds himself hospitalized after a coughing-jag at his office, the doctor, diagnosing AIDS puts him under a whole gambit of reactions that those who find themselves afflicted generally exhibit: confusion, denial, rejection of any relationship to others who have come down with AIDS, anger, accusation, and refusal to accept the inevitable result of the disease which in that period represented almost certain death. In this instance when Michael discovers that Peter has had outside sex a couple of times when a law case took him out of town for a long period, and accordingly, that he may have contracted AIDS from his lover, he insists the he is the one most able and willing to care for him leave.

      The network standards and practices committee were insistent that Peter be presented as the villain of the piece in their attempt to portray homosexuality in a negative manner. Erman rejected their demands, threatening to reveal their tactics to the media, and they backed down. They continued to insist, however, that there be no physical contact between the two gay characters—ridiculous when one perceives that one of the lessons of the film was that AIDS was primarily contracted through physical sexual contact. On television they weren’t even granted a kiss.

       After Peter accuses Michael of still not having come to terms with his own life, Michael flees back to his family, faced finally with not only telling them that he is gay and that his next-door friend is his at-home lover but that he is ill with AIDS.

      Michael’s father, a lumberyard executive, cannot believe the truth, like so many fathers facing even less dire reports, absolutely rejecting his son. Fortunately, the mother is played by Rowlands who has spent her life creating a treasure-chest of feisty lovers and mothers, and takes on the role of Katherine Pierson, a woman who refuses to abandon her son in his time of most need, and with relish. In fact, as the movie goes forward it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend why such a caring and outgoing woman could have lived most of her life with such a gruff and grumpy being as her husband Nick. Although she continues to beg Michael not to give up on his father, we gradually begin to comprehend why the son has not ever been able to “come out” previously to his father, and we begin to wonder whether her husband will be able to live up to her assertions.

      In many senses this work is so overstuffed with all the possible familial and societal dilemmas and roadblocks that sufferers of AIDS might face that we lose sight of Quinn’s character. He becomes instead a kind of modern-day Job, a symbol of what it means to suddenly be faced at a young age with one’s own death living among a still basically homophobic and terrified populace.

      When Michael suddenly undergoes severe uncontrollable tremors an ambulance is called only to be told by the drivers, upon discovering that their patient is sick with AIDS, that they refuse to transfer to the hospital. His father must carry his own son down the stairs and drive him to the institution by himself.

       Michael’s own sister, with whom he has long been close, refuses to visit the house; she is pregnant and fearful, despite assurances, that she might catch the disease simply from being in the same room with him. Michael’s father, still unable to come to terms with the son he loved but apparently never truly knew, refuses to visit him throughout his hospital stay.

       Peter finally visits the family, he and Michael returning to some sort of normalcy, and Katherine realizes what a perfect choice her son has made in his companion. But he is made to feel unwelcome by Nick and the other tensions surrounding Michael and his relationship, and returns to Chicago to await Michael’s own return.

       Yet for all of the stuffgeschicte that the creators felt necessary to portray the struggle gay AIDS patients had to face, one cannot help but be moved by An Early Frost and be thankful for its existence. As Erman, himself a gay man, was working on his film his cinematographer, Woody Omens, was concerned that every time he looked over at his colleague he saw him in tears. I dare anyone with a shred of empathy to watch this film without them.

       There are some scenes, moreover, that simply stand out in their stark surreality. Encouraged to attend a therapy session in the hospital with other dying AIDS patients, Michael is horrified with their conversation, particularly by the gallows humor of the most flamboyantly gay of them, Victor Mitado, played brilliantly by the always entertaining gay actor John Glover. Immediately identifying Michael’s condition, Victor admits, “I’ve had everything. I’m a medical marvel.”

       When another member of the group, a black man, tells them that he was fired for having AIDS and lost his health benefits, his boss having had his office disinfected, Victor snaps back: “Lemon-scented or pine?”  When the conversation turns to the straight man among them who reports that when his wife left she hugged him, but turned away her face, another responds that at least he had someone to hug, expressing his sadness with the fact that he will never be hugged or kissed again. Victor interrupts, “Well no one’s asked me. I’m available!”

       Finally, when the others become aware that one of their group is missing, the discussion leader reports that he has died. One young man, Todd, his face covered with tumors, begins to cry. “You know I’m getting tired of making friends who keep dying.” Victor once again turns the sorrow into levity. “I know what you mean. It’s almost impossible to put together a dinner party these days.” But when the same young man suggests they all should just...”end it,” Victor is the only one who reaches out and puts his hand lovingly on his shoulder, pulls him toward him and hugs him close,” asking him to openly relieve his grief.

       Michael gets up and leaves, unable to deal with the only way these people have learned to survive their ordeal. “I don’t belong here,” he claims.

        Yet later he becomes close friends with Victor, awarding him his own bathrobe which Victor has admired and serving as his “lawyer” as his new friend makes out his last will and testament. Unfortunately, Victor does not complete it before his death, Michael discovering a cleaning man in his room, throwing all his possessions, including the robe, into the trash before disinfecting the place.

      And, when at the lowest point of his own suffering our reluctant hero determines to commit suicide by automotive asphyxiation from which he is saved by his still someone begrudging father, we realize that before the curtain falls the elder will be forced to recognize that his son has been more of man in openly facing his life choices and death than he himself has ever been. 

      Eventually, Michael determines to return to Peter and live out whatever time he has left with the man he has chosen as his “lifetime companion.” even if that lifetime must now be condensed into only a year or a few months. As Nick and Katherine wave goodbye this time to their son, they know that it may be forever, but surely, offscreen at least, he will be awarded by Paul with many a kiss.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).           

 

Hiroshi Teshigahara | Suna no onna (Woman of the Dunes) /1964

a house at sea

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kōbō Abe (screenplay, based on his novel), Hiroshi Teshigahara (director) Suna no onna (Woman of the Dunes) /1964

 

The death of Hiroshi Teshigahara on April 14th of 2001, led me to review the film, which I last saw, I believe, while in college. Having remembered little of my previous viewing, I was delighted to rediscover/discover this masterpiece.

     Although critics of the sixties (and some today) make a great deal of Abe's existentialist concerns, I think today the film points us less to its philosophical (and thematic) issues, while revealing its closer relationship to the Absurdists of the 1950s and early 1960s such as Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. While clearly having a relationship with Sartre's and Camus' ideas, the film has less to do with moral action than it does with indeterminate purposelessness, and its metaphors continually point to the absurdity of the major characters' situations.

     Like many of the film's beautiful images, the plot is nearly an abstraction and can be easily summarized: an entomologist, Niki Jumpei, visits an isolated island consisting mainly of sand dunes, home to the beetle he is researching. He plans three days on this desolate island, returning to civilization each afternoon by bus. When he misses the bus, some local villagers, actually wily town elders, suggest that he stay in a local house. The houses, however, all appear to be located in deep ravines of sand, with access only through rope ladders.

      Niki, a true innocent, descends to the house assigned to him, and enjoys a pleasant meal, despite the continuing intrusion of sand, with the woman living there, a widow whose husband and daughter have been buried in a sandstorm.

      At first, the widow seems highly uneducated, explaining that her house is also subject to rot because of the moisture in the sand, an idea which the scientist, Niki, ridicules: we all know sand is dry. Other such sentiments have led some critics to describe her as ignorant, but we later learn that she is far wiser than her "guest."

      The widow spends the night, oddly to Niki's way of thought, digging out the sand from around her ramshackle house, depositing it in containers which the locals hoist up and spirit away (for illegal use, we later learn, in construction; sand with such a heavy salt content is no good for making concrete). She explains that it's easier to work at night, and the sand must be taken away if her and her neighbors' houses are to survive. Despite the continual rain of the fine grains of sand, Niki eventually falls to sleep, awakening to observe his now-naked host lying upon her futon.

     Dressing, Niki arranges his knapsack and bugs, preparing to leave; but when he seeks out the ladder, he discovers it has been pulled up. Desperately, he tries to climb the walls of sand on either side of the house, producing merely small avalanches of more sand that result in him falling back to where he has started from.

   Querying his host, the terrified Niki demands an explanation for what she answers "he already knows." He has been duped by the locals, and is now trapped like an animal in this hell of a sandpit. The island gets few visitors, and like others before him, he has been "kidnapped" to help in the village's activities.

     The rest of the film is a study in Niki's reactions, as, at first remaining determined to escape, he refuses to help shovel the sand, later turning to violence, gagging and tying up the woman. When he finally takes the towel from her mouth, she explains that the drink and food they have are rationed, and they will not deliver any new water until he begins to work.

      As the two endure the never-ending rain of sand in their horrific thirst, Niki finally surrenders, and water is delivered. In a beautifully filmed scene of high eroticism, the two carefully brush and wash the sand from each other's bodies, the woman—who obviously has been starving for the touch of a human hand—gasping in the simple pleasure of the act.

     Niki later binds together enough rope to temporarily escape, but when he attempts to outrun the local posse, he falls into quicksand; they dig him out only to return him to his internment. Pleading for just an hour each day at the ocean, Niki is hopeful that the local leaders may decide in his favor. They will grant him his wish, they report, only if he has sex with the "woman" while the entire village looks on, evidently their only form of entertainment. In a violent scene in which he attempts to force her to join him in the act, Niki loses out to the woman who is determined to keep her moral ground.

     Niki, it is apparent, must come to terms with the absurd conditions of his existence. At one point, he asks the obvious existential question: "Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?" Yet a far more important interchange re-veals the miraculous salvation of their lives; referring to the endless sand about them, the man observes: "It's like building a house in the water when ships exist. Why insist on a house?" The wiser woman provides the simplest of answers in such an absurd world: "You want to go home too."

 

    The home Teshigahara builds for the film viewer is an ever-shifting reality that is simultaneously breathtakingly beautiful and horrific. For this couple not only must live in a world in which no values are permanent, but endure an ever-changing landscape that reminds them every moment of their own mortality. Whereas, at the beginning of the movie, Niki checks his watch often, by the end of the film his new Eve reports that she has no idea of the time.

     What ultimately comes to matter most is the relationship forged between the two. When the woman becomes pregnant and the villagers are forced to lower a ladder to take her away, they forget to pull it up, and Niki cautiously follows them into a possible escape.

     Yet in the next scene we see him leaning against the house in the pit of sand. He cannot leave her. Besides he has made a new discovery: he has found a way to draw water out of sand just as she has maintained a house on a sea of sand. The absurd has been transformed into reality.

 

Los Angeles, May 4, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (May 2009).             

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).       

 

Nicholas Ray and Robert Parrish | The Lusty Men / 1952

being scared

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Dortort, Alfred Hayes, Horace McCoy, Andrew Solt, and Jerry Wald (screenplay, based on a novel by Claude Stamush), Nicholas Ray and Robert Parrish (directors) The Lusty Men / 1952

 

You have to forgive this film for its utterly inappropriate title, The Lusty Men—it might as well have been titled The Randy Cowboys. Clearly, one or more of its numerous writers tossed out the title to attract a prurient interest, or some studio head demanded a “sexier” come-on. But, fortunately, it has nothing to do with Nicholas Ray’s sensitive portrayal of rodeo performers and their addictions to that self-destructive sport. Despite sometimes tense male-to-male relationships and both central characters’ love for the film’s central woman character, played by Susan Hayward, there is nothing even slightly “lusty” about their acts, particularly of a heterosexual nature.

     Injured by a Brahma bull he attempts to ride, veteran rodeo rider Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum) decides to retire, returning to his childhood home, a now crumbling, run-down place owned by Jeremiah (Burt Mustin). The place, however, would be perfect for a local couple, Wes and Louise Merrit (Arthur Kennedy and Hayward), who attempt to save money to buy it from Wes’s meager earnings as a cowhand.

      Hired to work at the same ranch, Jeff attracts the attention of Wes, who, without telling his wife, is determined to enter a local rodeo. When he does well, he becomes determined to join the rodeo circuit with Jeff as his trainer-partner—over the serious objections of his wife. Since he can make far more at a single rodeo that he can save from his own annual wages, he stakes his chances on riding, insistent that we will pull out the moment he makes enough money to buy the derelict farm. As he tells Jeff, who is a kind of worn-out, slightly cynical philosopher throughout the film:

 

                        Wes: A fella’s bankroll could get fat in a hurry, rodeoin’.

                        Jeff: Bahh… Chicken today, feathers tomorrow.

                        Wes: Now if he played it smart when he had the chicken.

 

       As a rodeo wife, however, Louise begins to perceive the other side of “rodeoin’ as she meets former friends of Jeff, such as Booker Davis (Arthur Hunnicutt), who, once a champion, is a now crippled old man.

 

                         Jeff: Old Book used to be one of the best bronc riders in the

                                  business.

                         Wes: What happened?

                         Jeff: Punchy. Bronc shook his brains loose. He’s head wrangler

                                 for Dawson now.  

      

    When another competitor, Buster Burgess (Walter McCoy) is killed by a bull, he leaves behind a bitter wife, Grace (Lorna Thayer). Depressed by what she has observed, Louise decides to stay away from the rodeo activities, allowing another woman, Babs (Eleanor Todd) to move in on her husband. When he is invited to a party Babs is throwing, Louise attends the affair, pouring a drink over her rival’s head.

       Meanwhile Jeff warms up to Louise, at one point, when she has been offered the possibility to take a shower in Rosemary Burgess’ trailer, comically encountering a suddenly jealous friend:

 

                     Buster: (entering Rosemary’s trailer to find Jeff sitting inside. The

                        water can be heard running in the background). Who’s in the shower?

                     Jeff: Lady.

                     Louise: (from the shower) Jeff, can you hand me a towel?

                     Buster: (Jeff starts to get up but Buster stops him) I’ll get it.

                        (He walks in on Louis in the shower and she screams.) That

                        ain’t Rosemary!

                     Jeff: Nooooooo.

 

     When Jeff attempts to suggest a relationship with Louise, she remains true to Wes. His answer represents the kind of witty, understated dialogue behind much of Mitchum’s acting and reveals Ray’s brilliant manipulation of his characters:

 

                     Jeff: (to Louise) I do think I ought to kiss you just once,

                               though, for all the times I won’t.

 

       Throughout, Jeff has represented riding as an act that requires respect, arguing for a healthy fear for what they do, presenting the idea, once again, in his philosophy of alternatives:

 

                     Jeff: I’ve been scared, I’ve been not scared.”

      But as Wes continues winning, having now won more than enough to buy the house, he loses the necessary “being scared” about his profession, lashing out against his partner for his often skeptical comments and for taking part of the money based on Wes’s own feats. When the two part ways, Jeff determines to go back to “rodeoin” even though he is clearly now out of shape.

      In the first two events, roping and riding, he does well. But in the bronc riding contest his foot becomes caught in the stirrup after he has brilliantly ridden the horse, and he is killed, demonstrating to the hard-headed Wes, just how dangerous the business is. Wes quits the rodeo circuit, returning home with his loving wife.

     Anyone who has seen this film, although they might certainly recognize that I have been quite truthful to the plot and sometimes even the “feeling” of the film, will realize that there is also something missing in my description. Although it’s clear, at least in the beginning that Wes loves his wife, he also loves Jeff, or at least what he stands for. And if it’s true what Jeff keeps trying to instill in Wes’ resistant mind that no one comes truly away from rodeo life truly as a winner, Wes loves the masculine comradery more, perhaps, that the heteronormative life which he has been living.

      As Leonard Quart’s intelligent review in Cineaste in 2015 points out, “Ray’s deepest sympathies are for outsiders, not for those who choose domesticity.” And even if Wes, while winning, also recognizes things might easily turn on him, as it has for Jeff, he, like the director himself, “is sympathetic to the men, who revel in the applause of the crowd and are willing to risk their lives for small rewards. His heart goes out to those who wander endlessly, like Jeff, who love the rodeo life. Jeff has his flaws, but he conveys a touch of nobility—more so than any of the other

characters in the film;” and even after their break and Jeff’s death, Wes continues to reaffirm his homoerotic love of his mentor: “He was the best,” something he surely might never declare about his fretful wife.

      1952, given the still deeply enforced Film Production guidelines, moreover, was still a long ways to 1955—when Ray could feel somewhat freer through the characters of the teenagers of Rebel without a Cause to challenge societal normality and even its ideas about sexuality—to go any further with the deep homoerotic relationship between Wes and Jeff would have been impossible in 1952. As it was, the studio, so Quat reports, “pushed for a Hollywood-style sentimental finish with Jeff surviving and going off into the sunset with an ex-girlfriend,” to which Ray refused.

     Wes does return to farming and his domestic relationship, but Ray makes it quite clear that “Louise and Wes have chosen a more secure and tedious, but less autonomous and adventurous life. From Ray’s perspective, nobody wins in a film where one feels a gloomy fatalism underlying all the action. The Lusty Men is a small, poetic film with an emotional resonance that goes beyond its bare narrative.”

     And we know that the rest of Wes’ life will never be able to match the tales he will tell anyone who will listen about the appearance out of nowhere of the great rodeo hero Jeff and his own great days in the saddle. Those same stories, alas, will be Louise’s punishment for not only also having fallen in love with Jeff, but for drawing her husband back into the heteronormative society which could never have permitted either of their seemingly momentary manias.

     If these men are indeed “lusty,” both for other women and perhaps for their male compatriots, it is a sin only of the mind. Life in 1952 was intentionally delimited, closed off, and bleak when it came to changes and difference.

      

Los Angeles, September 26, 2012, revised August 15, 2024

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2012).       

Alan Rudolph | Choose Me/ 1984

gamblers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alan Rudolph (screenwriter and director) Choose Me / 1984

 

Much like One from the Heart, Rudolph's movie of two years later begins with music and, in this case, dance. Teddy Pendergrass' song, "Choose Me" ("Come on, choose me, baby /  Ooh, choose me, baby") serves as a kind overture, both structurally and literally, for Rudolph's own operatic-like story. One by one, as Eve's bar closes and people enter the street to be tempted by each other and the seemingly ever-present prostitutes on this small cul-de-sac, we meet some of the major players—all desperate for love, but unable to find the right partners. Each poses, dances, momentarily flirts, but each also leaves alone.

     Like Coppola's film, Choose Me is filled in garish colors and theatrically-lit sets that references theater far more than American film history, with the exceptions, once more, of Sirk and Ray. Rudolph, accordingly, makes it clear from the beginning that what we will be witnessing is not a realistic portrayal of down-and-out Los Angeles life, but a comic romance with dark tones and narrative possibilities.

     Finally, Rudolph tips his hat to Coppola again (instead of to his mentor, Robert Altman) by heavily employing music throughout, music by Phil Woods, Luther Vandross, and Pendergass, that comments on the feelings of the film's characters and its events.

     Yet Rudolph's film is much less "sweet," the dialogue, unlike One from the Heart, highly witty, and the film's thematic implications are far more reaching. In one of the very first scenes we witness what is clearly a Veteran Hospital where one of the directors is trying to explain to a family member that she will have to take back into her care a mental patient, Mickey (Keith Carradine), whom they are about to release. Even though his previous violence is mentioned, it is clear that they need the room for more seriously ill patients.

    But the relative is obviously reluctant, and while the two are speaking, Mickey walks off, reappearing soon after at Eve's bar, over which Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), as owner, superintends. This Eve, however, is not the Eve for whom Mickey is looking; she has apparently killed herself. But the fact hardly seems to matter as Mickey quickly appears to be smitten with the new Eve, staring intensely at her as he drinks (vodka and a beer with "two inches of head."), a habit to which later readily admits ("Pearl Antoine: God, you love to stare at women. Mickey: Old habit."). The implications of his behavior are obvious: he is either a Satan, a snake ready to tempt any Eve he encounters, or an Adam seeking love. We never do discover which being he is, but before the first of these long nights has ended, he asks Eve to marry him.

     A regular in this bar, Pearl Antoine (Rae Dawn Chong), is a silly rich woman with pretensions of being a poet. Her poetry might remind some of Gilbert Sorrentino's hilarious satire of poetic aspirations in his fiction Mulligan Stew:

 

                     No matter who I'm with,

                     They want to know if I'm still sleeping with you.

                     I say that you sleep while I die a little

                     But I'm not afraid of death.

                     At least you get laid in your coffin.

 

     Mickey's lack of response, results in Pearl Antoine's upbraiding of him, and his comeback which is worthy of a Sorrentino character:

 

                     Pearl Antoine: You weren't even listening.

                     Mickey: You want to get laid.

                     Pearl Antoine: It was just a poem.

                     Mickey: Just a thought.

 

    In fact, Mickey soon reveals that he once taught poetry at Yale, the first of many seemingly "fish tales" he tells, making us suspect that is still quite insane. Later he suggests that he has been an international spy and a commercial photographer, as well as working as a machinist. He has also, so he reports, killed another man over a woman. But whatever his fascinating past, Mickey spends the first night of this tale, sleeping on a bus station bench.

     Later we discover that Pearl Antoine visits the bar just to keep an eye on Eve, who is having an affair with Pearl Antoine's seedy ex-husband, Zack. Jealousy and revenge are already in the air, and when Mickey walks away with Pearl Antoine, we witness the look of hurt and suffering in Eve's face. Both Satan and Adam have evidently forsaken her.

     In her pain, she telephones the radio doctor, Dr. Love, who goes by the name of Nancy (Geneviève Bujold), a hilariously portrayed radio host who spouts psychiatric jargon about men, women, and love but who herself is nearing a mental breakdown and is apparently still a virgin ("I've never loved anyone. I don't think I can."). When Dr. Love fails to help, Eve calls up her slightly creepy bartender, Bill Ace (John Larroquette) for sexual fulfillment.

     Mickey has joined Pearl Antoine not for sex, it turns out, but because she will take him to a special location where men, including Zack, are gambling. Mickey is desperate for the cash that might take him by bus to Las Vegas so that he can collect his possessions and money he left there. Luck is with him this time around, as he bests Zack.

   The marvelous thing about Choose Me is its clever relationships to 19th century French Boulevard comedies. Once the major characters are introduced, one by one Mickey sexually encounters them, first Nancy—who coincidentally has just moved into Eve's house as a roommate. Much like Terence Stamp in Pasolini's film Teorema, each character finds something that excites and enchants them about Mickey's personality and appearance. Nancy is quickly released from her sexual inhibitions, bringing a newfound excitement and wisdom to her radio commentaries, somewhat shocking yet thrilling to her colleagues, particularly her boss, Ralph Chomsky (a reference to the linguist Noam Chomsky?), played by artist Ed Ruscha.

     We also begin to realize through this incident that Mickey may be speaking truthfully when he claims he never lies. In his suitcase Nancy discovers a Yale Review, original photographs of major celebrities, international passports, and articles from the German magazine Stern about Mickey's arrest in the Soviet Union.

     Yet we still can only imagine that Mickey is pathological when he suddenly asks Nancy to marry him.

                                  

                           Nancy: Mickey, Mickey. You can't go around asking every woman

                                        you kiss to marry you.

                           Mickey: Why not?

                           Nancy: Why not...

                           Mickey: I only kiss women I'd marry.

     Pearl Antoine is equally sexually gratified by Mickey, and, for a few moments, it appears that she may finally free herself of Zack—that is until he enters her apartment at the very moment when Mickey is snapping her almost nude photograph. A fight ensues, Zack becoming the victor, relieving Mickey of his gambling winnings, and socking his ex-wife in the eye.

 

  Coincidences in this film abound. Earlier Zack had called Eve, with Nancy answering the phone, providing him (she has little else to offer) with sexual advice. When he determines to pay Nancy a visit after being scorned by Eve, he discovers Mickey in the house, who has come to talk to Eve. Another fight between the two men breaks out, this time Mickey grabbing the gun and demanding his money back!   Eve, which whom Rudolph's quirky story has begun, is the only one not yet been the recipient of Mickey's sexual charms. Their encounter in the final scenes begins with potential violence—perhaps a repeat of the past—as Eve threatens suicide with a gun. Mickey fails to dissuade her, until he too pulls his gun, threatening his own life.

  

   The two collapse into each other's arms, admitting that their guns were unloaded, in short, that it has all been in demonstration. In the final scene they are on the bus to Las Vegas after, apparently, quickly marrying. Mickey grins like a Cheshire cat, having won the love of Eve. Eve, finally somewhat contented, smiles. A brief conversation with another passenger, who asks if they're going to Las Vegas to gamble, however, troubles her. She replies, "You could call it that," her commentary bringing fear into her face. Is Mickey a true lunatic? "That's why you chose me," he reassures. She smiles, looks troubled again. Mickey remains frozen in his grin.

    All of the characters have gambled everything over the three long nights of Choose Me in the hopes of gaining love and meaning in their lives. We—perhaps no one can—know if they have chosen right. For there is no one "truth" when it comes to love.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2011

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).