Robert Altman | A Prairie Home Companion / 2006

the sweet bye and bye

by Douglas Messerli

 

Garrison Keillor (screenplay, based on a story by Garrison Keillor and Ken LaZenik), Robert Altman (director) A Prairie Home Companion / 2006

 

Directed by one of America’s most noted filmmakers, Robert Altman, and with a screenplay by the beloved humorist and radio-host Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion was perhaps one of the most anticipated films of the lackluster 2006 film season. Despite some critical appreciation, however, the film mostly garnered mediocre reviews, in particular in the widely-read New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. A. O. Scott of the latter paper perhaps summarized the comments best in his characterization of Keillor and Altman’s collaboration: “Together they have confected a breezy backstage comedy that is also a sly elegy: a poignant contemplation of last things that goes down as smoothing and sweetly as a lemon drop.” In summary, the New York paper noted that Keillor’s “weekly cavalcade of wry Midwestern humor and musical Americana has never set out to make anyone’s hair stand on end. Notwithstanding the occasional crackle of satire or sparkle of instrumental virtuosity, it mostly offers reliable doses of amusement embedded in easygoing nostalgia. It looks back on—or, rather, reinvents—a time when popular culture was spooned out in grange halls and Main street movie palaces….” The movie, Scott concluded, was “more likely to inspire fondness than awe.”

     Similarly, David Denby, writing in The New Yorker, noted that Altman and Keillor are very similar in the smooth flow of their work—Altman in the movement of his camera and Keillor through the tales of his tongue. “…A bit of tension might have helped the movie. A Prairie Home Companion has many lovely and funny moments, but there’s not a lot going on. Dramatically, it’s mellow to the point of inertia.” Evidently preferring the radio show to the movie, critic Carina Chocano observed, “The Prairie Home Campanion of the movie is hardly the middlebrow juggernaut known to listeners. Instead it’s been converted to kitsch museum, which might as well house a giant ball of string. The improvised patter is funny and sharp, the music kicky and the nods to fake sponsors familiar, but without Keillor’s monologue and the show’s collective inclusion on the joke, the movie falls into a strange nostalgia for something that hardly anyone remembers.”

     The Los Angeles Times' evaluation is particularly interesting given the fact that I saw this film as an apologia of sorts for just the “strange nostalgia” so apparent in Keillor’s radio show. In this sense, the movie I witnessed—which clearly is not the same movie seen by these critics—is a requiem of sorts, a musical celebration for the dead, a kind of secular mass in celebration and confession of the tongue-and-cheek, slyly winking art that Keillor has brilliantly performed over these many years. It is almost as if Keillor were telling his American audiences—as Star Trek star William Shatner once told an avid fan—“Get a life!” Keillor and Altman do work brilliantly together, but their artifact, far from being a smooth-running linguistic machine, is actually a gathering of disparate and dissociative individuals and events that merely pretends to represent a larger whole. As Chicago Tribune reviewer Michael Phillips perceptively commented, Altman “captures a sense of ensemble and, at the same time, an ensemble dissolving into individual puzzle pieces—outsiders all, everybody doing their own thing.”

     Pretense, indeed, is the major subject of this film. The performers crowding St. Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater stage are as romantic as F. Scott’s Daisy and Gatsby, larger than life figures creating their own realities as they go along. The hilarious cowboys, Dusty and Lefty (typological names for American cowpokes) may harmoniously sing and joke their way through their performances, but offstage they bicker perpetually over each other’s behavior, weight, and physique, Dusty (Woody Harrelson) being particularly concerned by the obvious outline of Lefty’s (John C. Reilly) butt crack—hardly the usual subjects of discussion by such archetypes of American mythology. If the two might imagine themselves onstage as joke-spinning Lotharios, their offstage relationships with women consist of child-like humor such as pretending ignorance of the assistant director’s pregnancy, which former detective Guy Noir jokingly reveals by lifting up her blouse.

     The men, who have worked together even longer than their many years on this show—have been in the business at least as long as Keillor, who remembers their earlier morning radio show— spend much of the movie talking and singing humorously about their own relationship, with Keillor introducing as an inseparable couple: “the paco belles of the prairie, the “bondsies” of bunkhouse.” Although their constant banter between one another is basically filled with outrageous lies—such as Dusty’s claim that he met Lefty in prison with Johnny Cash, and Lefty’s insistence that he gets lonely on the prairie without someone to talk to, “somebody smart that is”— it’s obvious that their comments are not only part of their comic shtick but an aspect of their long-term relationship. Even when asked to get on stage, Dusty comments, in front of Yolanda's teenage daughter, that they will be coming "as soon as old spudbutt here shuts his wrapper," punning on the other's nudity that sounds more like gay camp speak than cowboy lingo.

     And theirs is a “guy’s world,” as the advertisement for “Guy’s Shoes” that introduces them suggests. This male footwear, incidentally, contains a “secret hole” where you can store your cash, which Lefty claims to use out on the rage.

     In short, the film strongly hints that these two men are not just an “act” who often perform obscene lyrics such as “Come ride my pony all night long / Come ride it bareback I’ll sing you a song,” but most likely are a gay couple. Of course, the word “bareback” as used here could possibly mean to ride a horse without clothes—addressed to a kind of cowgirl Lady Godiva, although highly unlikely on the open prairie where the “Trailhands” travel together alone. But in this instance he wants the rider of the “pony,” another word for his cock (as evidenced in many a raunchy jock song as posted on the Urban Dictionary), not only to join him all night long but to let him fuck him without a condom, the word generally used in describing gay “bareback” sex. If you enter the word on Goggle, you will be greeted with a list of several gay porno sites.

      These two might remind a sage cineaste of the elderly couple of stage comedians who bunk together in John Ford’s early 1927 film Upstream, gay men who distract others by their comedy characters, in the case of the Trailhands the two hiding behind their macho cowboy exteriors.

   The two remaining sisters of the former Johnson family act (“The Carter family. Like us only famous”), Yolanda and Rhonda (brilliantly performed by Meryl Streep and lesbian Lily Tomlin) recount in offstage conversations an absurd series of events centered on their hard-working mother’s attempts to keep the financially strapped family together. Their sister, suffering a hypoglycemic attack, is arrested and jailed for eating a doughnut without paying; upon hearing of her arrest, their shamed father suffers a stroke and dies.

     Their lives, we discover, are also intertwined with Keillor’s: he later recounts how he saved a naked man attached to a runaway kite. In search of employment, he and his new-found “friend” head to Chicago, but, tiring of his company, Keillor purposely leaves him behind in Oshkosh, where his former companion meets Yolanda and marries her. Years later, Yolanda and Keillor also have an affair. In short, these sisters represent their whole world as a kind of extended dysfunctional family. In response to these and other changes in her fate—including the final performance of the ongoing show the night of the film’s action—Yolanda speciously argues that whenever one door closes, another opens up. No matter that behind the new door there might be even more disasters in store, in her cul-de-sac of logic, she floats through a life—with her more cynical and savvier sister beside her—that is no more believable than the stories she relates. When in the final scenes of the movie her daughter Lola gets her “big break”—performing a disastrously improvised rendition of “Frankie and Johnnie”—Yolanda perceives it as the new opportunity she has been seeking; never mind that the young, suicidally inclined girl has little stage talent. The film later reveals she has a head for business.

     Keillor does not spare himself in his revelation of individual pretense. On stage the brilliantly glib commentator comes alive, but offstage he is presented as an unemotional and seemingly unfeeling human who refuses even to announce the death during the show of fellow singer L. Q. Jones, who has died while waiting in his dressing room to consummate his love with the set’s “lunch lady.” When asked, “What if you die some day?” he coolly responds, “I will die.” “Don’t you want people to remember you?” “I don’t want them to be told to remember me.” Unable to accept the fact that Keillor has obviously “closed the door” on their relationship, Yolanda continues to chastise him even during a moment of onstage improvisation.

    Hovering over these self-pretending beings is “the dangerous woman,” seen by some but not by all. To Keillor she recounts her own death which occurred when she lost control of her car while laughing at his “A Prairie Home Companion” penguin joke (a joke—featured on the actual radio show—that Keillor delivered in such a badly mangled way that it became a recurring skit):

 

“Two penguins are standing on an ice floe. The first penguin

says, ‘you look like you’re wearing a tuxedo.’ The second

penguin says, ‘what makes you think I’m not?’”

 

She asks Keillor, “Why is that funny?” “I guess because people laugh at it.” “I’m not laughing,” she replies.

     Indeed, it is not “funny” in a standard sense. As Henri Bergson tells us, most humor is based upon incongruity, upon something that would not be normally funny if it actually happened to us. The penguin joke—a perfect example of what Bergson describes as “inversion”—works because it so openly reveals our desire to accept the simulacrum instead the real. Since the penguin vaguely looks like he’s dressed in a tuxedo he may be actually dressed in a tuxedo. The joke points to our desires to believe in a reality that we know is untrue, our willingness to be gullibly deceived.

     This joke, in fact, is at the heart of Altman and Keillor’s film. For the “strange nostalgia” that A Prairie Home Companion evokes is, like the penguin, a simulacrum of the American past, a past so wittily and craftily presented that Americans want to believe it even while recognizing its falsity. So too does this film present onstage a musical world so engaging—the songs, whose lyrics mostly were created by Keillor himself, seem close enough to the real thing that we enjoy them as if they were classics—that despite what the film has revealed about the offstage lives of these figures, audiences (the false audience of the film, the “real” film-going audience, and, evidently, most critics) cannot help but feel the immense pleasure of swallowing the sweet lemon drop.

     The “dangerous lady,” however, is more than dangerous and more than a lady, for she is the angel of death, Asphodel. In nature, the asphodel is a narcissus-like flower. Accordingly, this “angel” suggests that we often love ourselves and our past, perhaps, more than a present filled with other living beings. Death is, so to speak, “in the house,” and she mercilessly slays not only a singer and the visiting Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones) out to destroy this artifice of nostalgia, but ultimately everything and everyone upon who she casts her cold eyes. As Keillor has warned us, he too will die—and so too will we. But the question remains, will we live our lives in acceptance of the truth of being or will we remain, like Yolanda and the other performers of this homespun travesty, trapped in a mythologized invention of our experiences.

     Keillor and Altman reveal that such a view of reality can only end up with Americans facing the same philosophical endgame that Yolanda claims to joyfully embrace. Americans, Keillor and Altman suggest, are so desperate for the simulacrum, so much in love with the sentimentalized past epitomized in dramas such as Our Town—a scene from which Yolanda quotes early in this film—that we are readily willing to abandon the truth of our daily lives. What will it take to awaken us? Keillor warns, “We are not a beach people. We are a dark people who believe it could be worse, and are waiting for it,” a people afraid of the light.

     Within the movie, the characters do not awaken but, while dreaming of reviving their show, die, playing out their imaginary lives even in the sweet bye and bye:

 

Long-haired preachers come out every night

Try to tell us what’s wrong and what’s right;

But when asked about something to eat,

They just answer in accents so sweet:

“You will eat, bye and bye,

In that glorious land in the sky!

Chop some wood, ‘twill do you good,

There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2006

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 5 (November 2006).

Robert Altman | Prêt-à-porter (Ready to Wear) / 1994

the underside of fashion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Alman and Barbara Shulgasser (screenplay), Robert Altman (director) Prêt-à-porter (Ready to Wear) / 1994

 

It’s interesting to rewatch a Robert Altman film from 1994 which received almost universally negative reviews when it originally appeared, from the vantage point of 31 years later, when that director’s cinematic legacy as one of the most significant auteurs of his time is pretty much established.

    The critics didn’t much like Prêt-à-porter, the English language title Ready to Wear added, one suspects, when the execs and distributors grew fearful that US audiences would stay away from a French-titled film. Audiences in the US and Canada weren’t convinced by the English title either. The film made money only because of its international sales.

     Altman’s films, with their fast-moving series of seemingly unrelated events involving huge casts of often internationally acclaimed actors who often speak quietly on the sidelines or are filmed in conversations going on simultaneously with others, with even those sometimes  chopped up and collaged, have never thoroughly been embraced by the American public. And, in this case, critics cited a series of what they felt to be failures: 1) The film “finds absolutely nothing funny or fresh to say about the fashion industry and the ‘journalists’ who cover it with a wet kiss.” (Gene Siskell); 2) “There is a difference between creative improvisation and absolute chaos, and while [others of his] films were delicately balanced balls that magically stayed in the air, Ready to Wear…has a haphazard 'Let's go to Paris and see what happens' feeling that wastes everyone's time and talent." (Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times); “Virtually everything that happens is held up for our ridicule, yet it's never quite clear what we're supposed to be laughing at. The characters aren't really mocked for their attitudes, their obsessions with glamour and money and style. They aren't savaged in any specific, observational ways that could truly be called satirical. They're made fun of simply because they're silly, trivial human beings—walking punchlines in a joke that never arrives.” (Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly).

     In sum, Ready to Wear was seen as a plotless mess without characters well-developed enough to sustain any real satirical focus.

     Fashion critic Suzy Menkes, representing people in the industry at the center of the film’s focus, similarly argued, “For fashion folks, the film just didn't come off—either as an extended skit, or as a bitchy or brutal dissection of the industry."

     I’ll grant that this film perhaps takes an even more of a scattergun approach to its subject than most of his other films which cover vast groups of individuals such as the US medical military services in Korea (M*A*S*H), the mythological figures of the American West (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971 and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, 1976),  the country-western music scene (Nashville, 1975), heterosexual marriage between those from vastly different social stations (A Wedding, 1978) the disappearing British gentry (Gosford Park, 2001), or the last survivors of radio entertainment (A Prairie Home Companion, 2006), to name only a few of his comic foci.

      But Ready to Wear is actually not so very different from all the others in which almost all of which one or several individuals suddenly meet their death which causes those surrounding them to quickly perceive their lives beginning to unravel, revealing to nearly all the others of their immediate society how empty and unhappy they are in their desperate attempts to seek, maintain, change, or redeem love, social stature, their ability to communicate with others, their daily survival, and even their ability to sustain their sanity.

     Altman’s works are never merely satires, a genre which demands a far sharper, meaner, laser-beam focus than his friendlier buckshot approach allows. Rather, Altman is the late 20th-century Feydeau, a writer of farces, without any attempt to keep to the format of Feydeau’s or even Moliere’s well-made plays. I like how critic Adrian Martin describes his comic approach, characterizing it as something that “floats like mist” throughout what I might describe as the vast battleground in which his characters fight in their struggles to maintain what I described above: love, social stature, communication and sanity. Martin writes:

 

 “Altman has a strange way with comedy. He is not into precisely timed visual gags the way Blake Edwards is; and he steers clear of the Woody Allen style of carefully crafted, rapidly delivered one-liners. Altman likes his comic mood to float weirdly above the film like a mist. It is a comedy of interactions, of behaviours. Sometimes this can create a quietly insane, infectious flavour, as in his previous withering ode to Americans in Paris, the underrated psychiatric comedy Beyond Therapy (1987).

     Sometimes in his comedies Altman will use a funny anecdote as the basis for an ongoing plot thread: we see, in snatches, characters doing something mysterious for almost two hours, and then finally some kind of explanatory punch-line. That is how it goes in Prêt-à-Porter with the endless scenes of Louise (Teri Garr) shopping for clothes in Paris, all the while making strange communications with her husband Major Hamilton (Danny Aiello) [whose character, a buyer for the Chicago Marshall Fields stores, who is secretly a cross-dresser].

     Altman stretches this kind of material out so far and so thinly at times that the punch-line can come as an anti-climax, an indifferent tag. Short Cuts used this kind of deflatory, anti-climactic effect in a very inspired and expressive way; it went very well with the general emotional malaise of everybody and everything in the film….”

 

    Accordingly, there is always the danger that the simple-minded viewer—the condition in which Altman places nearly all of his audience members—won’t even pick up on the final connection of events. In Prêt-à-Porter, several of the critics missed the clues. Writing in Newsweek, David Ansen, for example, asks “Why, having staged the humiliation of three high-and-mighty fashion editors (Linda Hunt, Sally Kellerman and Tracey Ullman) at the hands of a smugly sadistic photographer (Stephen Rea), does Altman prepare us for their revenge—and forget to show it?”   

     Actually, we do very much see the results of their revenge for Milo O'Brannigan having tricked each of them by snapping uncompromising photographs. Sally Kellerman’s character steals his negatives and forces him to negotiate with them, ending O'Brannigan’s career as a noted fashion photographer; at the end of the film we see him photographing a group of babies, evidently the only subjects now available for his formerly salacious camera.

 

    Problems of connecting up the pieces in an Altman film are problematic to any reviewer. And who can blame anyone observing the battlefield of this Altman film from afar with a cast that includes Anouk Aimée, Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Kim Basinger, Stephen Rea, Lauren Bacall, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Lili Taylor, Sally Kellerman, Tracey Ullman, Linda Hunt, Rupert Everett, Forest Whitaker, Richard E. Grant, Danny Aiello, Teri Garr, Lyle Lovett, Jean Rochefort, Michel Blanc, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Ute Lemper, Anne Canovas, François Cluzet,—not to even mention the cameo appearances of fashion figures and designers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Björk modeling for him, Thierry Mugler, Sonia Rykiel, Christian LaCroix, Gianfranco Ferré, and Issey Miyake, and models such as Christy Turlington, Helena Christensen, Adriana Karembeu, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Carla Bruni, Naomi Campbell and Tatjana Patitz, along with actors Cher and Harry Belafonte? Our eyes are so busy trying to connect up names with the characters, that entire elements of the constantly shifting narrative often go unnoticed.

     Is it any wonder that many of these characters become mere types, moreover, and that almost all lack full, old-fashioned characterization? Altman is not an old-fashioned filmmaker, happy as he is to leave out plot and often character development. Improvisation is his game, and only if the actors are up to the role he assigns them and are given enough screen time to delineate their characters can we expect them to transcend stereotypes of even their assigned position in the whole of things.

     At the center of this societal kerfuffle is the wealthy, elegant, and totally aloof beauty Isabella de la Fontaine (Sophia Loren) who happens to be married to the head of the Paris Fashion Week (the occasion for our massive gathering), Olivier de la Fontaine (Jean-Pierre Cassel). It is his sudden death—from chocking on a ham sandwich he is nervously devouring—in a taxi occupied by an unknown man who is presumed to be his murderer that sets everyone and everything in the film into a frenzy. Part of the frenzy revolves around the fact that almost everyone hated Olivier, particularly his wife Isabella, who blithely admits to the busybody detectives, Inspectors Tantpis (Jean Rochefort) and Forget (Michel Blanc), that she is delighted for her husband’s demise.

     The suspected murderer is, in fact, Isabella’s first husband, Sergio (Marcello Mastrioianni), long thought to be dead and who years before as a Communist in trouble with Italian authorities left behind the fourteen or fifteen-year-old Isabella and escaped to the Soviet Union where he has had lived ever since. 

     Altman and his co-writer never bother to fully explain why he has determined at this very moment to return to the West and reconnect with Isabella, with whom he is still very much in love; all we know is that he has contacted Olivier, perhaps bribing him with the fact that Isabella is still married to him (now named Sergei) pointing out that Olivier, accordingly, is guilty of bigamy. In any event, the two men arrange to meet up, Sergei purchasing two matching Christian Dior ties in Moscow and mailing one to Olivier so that the two might recognize one another at the airport.

    It is there, after a brief interview Olivier is forced to undergo with Kitty Potter (Kim Basinger) of Fab TV—whose Texas-twanged inane questions are the true connecting link to most of the fashion figures of the film—where he and Sergei escape in the taxi in which Olivier chokes to death.

    Sergei flees, escaping without proper clothing, having dived into a river in order to escape. With the death of Olivier he also has no place to live and no money, requiring him throughout most of of the film to break into various other guest’s rooms to steal clothing and, at one point, to take over a room itself until he can meet up with his beloved Isabella.

      When the two finally manage do meet and make a date which ends in his purloined hotel bedroom, Altman symbolically represents their past in an homage to film history, by evoking the striptease scene between Loren and Mastroianni from their 1963 film Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Here the actors momentarily take over the characters, until the now older figures (both actors and characters are brought back into focus when in her attempt to sexually arouse her now elderly first husband, she realizes that he also a dead man whom she can do without, particularly when he falls asleep in the midst of her seduction. Loren leaves a note beside his snoring body hinting that she has no room in her life for two dead husbands.

    Surely closer to the dead man was his mistress Simone Lowenthal (Anouk Aimée), who heads the house of Lo. It is to Simone that the members of the fashion world present their condolences, even though she admits, later in the film, that Olivier was a hard to man to love. Even more slimy than her lover, however, is her handsome but needy son, Jack (Rupert Everett), who not only is having an affair with the sister Kiki behind his wife’s Dane’s (Georgianna Robertson) back, but who has just sold his mother’s company without her knowledge to a Texas bootmaker, Clint Lammeraux (Lyle Lovett) whose head designer is the color blind Slim Chrysler (Lauren Bacall).   

     When the time comes to prepare for her runway show, Simone finds that her dresses, like the male suits and pants stolen by Sergei, are also missing from her racks, “borrowed” for a photo shoot by the new triumvirate of Jack, Clint, and Slim, who have hired the equally sleazy photographer O'Brannigan, I mentioned above, to accompany the boots, now labeled “Lo,” with which they’ve willy-nilly stuck upon her model’s shapely feet and legs.

 

     As I have already argued, there isn’t much of a plot to interconnect most of the rest of the vast cast characters. The rest are basically ancillary figures of the fashion world who we meet through their homage to Simone or the through the often banal questions and musings of Bassinger’s character Kitty.

     As I have already argued, there isn’t much of a plot to interconnect most of the rest of the vast cast characters. The rest are basically ancillary figures of the fashion world who we meet through their homage to Simone or the through the often banal questions and musings of Bassinger’s character Kitty.

   The black “street” designer Cy Bianco (Forest Whitaker) is the most outspoken in his hatred of Simone’s former lover. He is a gay man in a relationship with his male assistant, but who is having a very hot affair with the prissy fellow fashion designer Cort Romney (Richard E. Grant) who is publicly devout to his female assistant, but almost faints in a fit of ecstasy at hearing Cy’s voice in secret telephone recontres.

     Both Cy and Cort’s assistants meanwhile are seeing one another on the sly as well, all trysts finally revealed at Cy’s “runway” show held in an underground subway, where they all accidentally meet up in a subway car where each couple has been making out; there they are unknowingly stalked down for an interview by our endlessly dense Kitty of Fab TV who hasn’t a clue that with her meaningless banter that she is interrupting their mutual peccadilloes. 

   Completely out of this incestuous loop are two US news reporters, Anne Eisenhower (Julia Roberts) and Joe Flynn (Tim Robbins), both of whom are forced to share a room that Joe was just checking out of and Anne checking into when their respective editors called demanding more information about Olivier de la Fontaine’s death. Anne, wearing only a tee-shirt declaring her as the “World’s Greatest Mom,” has lost her baggage in Houston, forgetting it in an airport bar.

    While Joe is on the phone with his editor, Sergei, desperate for clothing, steals his clothes bag.

     In short, neither Anne or Joe have anything to wear outside of the room they have been forced to share. He phones his reports in, quoting from local TV reports by Paris newscasters, while Anne watches the run-way shows on TV as well. But then, neither of them attend much to their jobs since Joe soon discovers that Anne is a lush, the two of them finding their consolation for being trapped together in a shared bed. In fact, they are the only two lovers who are free to absolutely make love, being as they are locked away in a world apart from others while also knowing that after Paris, they will never see each other again, both presumably returning home to their married lives. It’s almost as if they were living out a Parisian version of the Las Vegas slogan, “What happens in Vegas , stays in Vegas.”

 

       Sergei’s desperate search for something to wear and Anne and Joe’s lack of clothing, in fact, become a strange sub-theme in this film that is supposedly all about dressing up in the most fashionable of costumes. And these three outsiders, Sergei, Anne, and Joe come eventually to represent the real world outside of the Paris Fashion Week with its quite ridiculous runway sashays and trots.

    At one point, these outsiders’ point of view is actually trumpeted out from the Paris fashion world, as Kitty races over to interview Cher at the Bulgari jewelry party. Asked the most empty-minded of questions concerning what she feels about the attending the Bulgari party, Cher improvises in a somewhat predictable manner: “Well actually I don’t think it’s what you put on your body, but what’s inside your body that really matters.”

    Altman claims that he found Cher’s somewhat inane remark to be the perfect link to his basic theme, which is finally played out in some of the last few marvelous moments of this film.

     Since Simone Lowenthal’s business and her new season’s styles have been equally usurped, she announces at the beginning of her runway show—where most of the audience in attendence is now expecting a peek at both her clothes and the new Texas boots—that her presentation will represent a kind of “circle,” a “closure of sorts,” a look into what may be “emerging.”

     To everyone’s shock her models slowly begin to stroll up and down the runway entirely in the nude. Only one, the very pregnant Ute Lemper, while also naked, is wearing a trailing bridal veil. Altman observed of the scene: “The actors knew, but most of the audience didn’t so I got the surprise reactions I was hoping for. Those women were wonderful. …Without that scene the whole film probably wouldn’t make sense.”

    To most Americans, apparently, his movie still didn’t make sense, a confusion and frustration made clear by Kitty.

    The Fab reporter runs out of the show to broadcast her startled reactions in what might be described as a kind of public breakdown: “Well, what can I say? Simone Lo has showed us everything. I don’t know if any of this will make it to TV or not…. She showed us like it really is. It’s so old it’s true. It’s so true it’s new. It’s the oldest new look. It’s the newest old look. Simone Lo as created a new new look for every man, woman, and child. And they can all afford it. It’s all the bare look. So hooray for Simone Lo. What the hell am I talking about? What’s going on here on this planet? This is fucking fruitcake time. Is that fashion, is it? Is there a message out there? When you got a lot a naked people wandering around here. I mean, I’ve been forever trying to find out what this bullshit is all about. You know what, I have had it. I have had it! Goodbye, au revoir.”

       Behind her, the crowd is roaring their applause in a standing ovation, all of them seeming to comprehend the message that the Texas bimbo Bassinger plays can’t comprehend.

       She hands the microphone over to her French assistant Sophie Choiset (Chiara Mastroianni) who basically argues that Simone Lowenthal is speaking for women and sending a message to women of “not what to wear but how to think of what they want and need from fashion.”

       While that is also not necessarily a truly profound message, it is surely an alternative to the representations throughout of how women should dress in order to appeal and attract other men and women or to demonstrate their social status and their sense of well-being.

       For, at heart, what most of the characters of Altman’s movie really want is to do strip off those clothes and crawl into bed with one another. If Roberts’ character certainly does look great in the designer dress she has finally put on after her suitcase is finally delivered up, she has spent one of the most memorable weeks of her life perhaps in a hotel bathrobe. 

 

     One has to admit, however, that Loren, attending her dead husband’s funeral in a black dress with a red wrap, purse, and gigantic hat says a lot about the woman wearing it. As Roberts in her Pretty Woman role of Vivian Ward might express it, “Wow, that lady’s got class.”

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).