When it comes to eroticism, Body of Evidence is like Madonna’s new book. It knows the words but not the music. All of the paraphernalia and lore of S&M sexuality are here, but none of the passion or even enjoyment. We are told by one witness that sex with the Madonna character is intense. It turns out later he’s not a very reliable witness.
Bolero
(Directed by John Derek; starring Bo Derek, George Kennedy, 1984)
Bolero is a film starring Bo Derek as a woman who believes that the cure for a man’s impotence is for his woman to train as a bullfighter. Bolero is also the name of the composition by Ravel that Dudley Moore played in 10 while making love with Derek. So much we already know. Also, let’s see here, paging through the old dictionary . . . a bolero is a Spanish dance, characterized by sharp turns and revolutions of the body and stamping of the feet, and it also is a jacket of waist-length or shorter, usually worn open. So that explains the jacket of waist-length or shorter, usually worn open, which is Bo Derek’s only item of clothing during one scene in the movie. It also explains the sharp turns and revolutions of her body during the same scene, although there is no stamping of the feet, except by the viewer.
But I am still a little confused by the relationship between Derek and the bullfighter who is her lover. If you have not seen the movie, let me explain. Derek has graduated from a fancy women’s boarding school, and after mooning her professors she departs in search of a tall, dark, and handsome man.
First she meets a sheik, but he turns out to be a dud, maybe because he spends too much time inhaling the magic fumes of his hookah. So Bo goes to Spain, where she meets this all-around guy who herds cattle on a mountaintop, owns a winery, and is a bullfighter. If he also was an investment banker whose last book read was The Prophet, he could be a Dewar’s Profile. Bo and the guy make love at sunrise. Unfortunately, the sun rises directly into the camera at crucial moments. Then her lover goes into the ring to fight with the bull, and is gored in that portion of his anatomy he can least afford to spare in any continuing relationship with Derek. He is brave. While doctors fight to save his life, his only thought is for his dog. He asks Bo to be sure that the dog gets home safely.
Before long, Bo is observing that her lover is acting depressed and distant. Could this possibly be because of his horrible injuries? You would think so, and I would think so, but Bo tells him it doesn’t matter, and then she vows that he will live to fight again another day, so to speak. Then she starts taking bullfighting lessons. Oh, but I almost forgot. The Arab sheik tears himself away from his hookah long enough to fly to Spain and kidnap her. She is tied up in his open biplane, but manages to untie herself and jump off the plane. Then Bo is immediately back in her lover’s hacienda again. How did she get to the ground? For anyone with Bo’s faith, all is possible, and I think this is a real good omen for the lover. If she can get down in one piece, think what he might be able to do.
Let’s face it. Nobody is going to Bolero for the plot anyway. They’re going for the Good Parts. There are two Good Parts, not counting her naked ride on horseback, which was the only scene in the movie that had me wondering how she did it.
Breaking the Rules
(Directed by Neil Israel; starring Jason Bateman, Annie Potts, C. Thomas Howell; 1992)
Breaking the Rules is a movie about a guy who finds out he has a month to live, and decides to spend it in the worst buddy movie ever made.
The movie has to be seen to be believed. It is a long, painful lapse of taste, tone, and ordinary human feeling. Perhaps it was made by beings from another planet, who were able to watch our television in order to absorb key concepts such as cars, sex, leukemia, and casinos, but formed an imperfect view of how to fit them together.
This is the kind of movie where a scene is intended to make you cry, but you’re not crying, you’re wondering just how bad the dialogue can possibly be, and whether the filmmakers are indeed lacking in all instincts about what is believable or acceptable behavior, and what is not.
The movie opens with three childhood chums whose idea of a good time is to ride inside the dryers at the laundromat. One of the buddies throws up inside a dryer, and they get in trouble. One wonders, watching this scene, if the filmmakers know it is dangerous for kids to play inside laundry dryers? If they think it’s funny to show such a practice? If they couldn’t think of any other kind of prank?
The payoff comes when the kids are confronted by angry adults, and all three of them simultaneously point at the other two guys while chiming in unison, “He did it.” This establishes the ground rules: These characters know they are in a movie, and are reading dialogue, not performing ordinary human speech.
Flash-forward ten years. One of the kids stages a reunion between the other two, who are no longer on speaking terms. Reason: He has leukemia, and a month to live. All three young men immediately decide to get a van and set off cross-country to California, where it is the dying lad’s final wish to appear on Jeopardy.
Along the way, they stop off for some Nevada casino action, and meet a waitress who instantly marries the dying kid and asks him to sleep with her because she wants his baby. Nope, says the doomed one; it’s my buddy who wants to sleep with you. Ever the good sport, the waitress sleeps with the buddy on her wedding night—on a couch in the same room where the other two friends are sleeping. How do they react? They pull the sheets over their heads, and giggle.
One appalling scene follows another. The illness, the death, the funeral, the videotape. Was there no one to cry out, “Stop this madness?” No one to read the script and see that it was without sense or sensibility? No one to listen to the dialogue and observe that nobody in the whole world has ever talked like this? No one to say that you cannot inspire sympathy for characters who act in a manner contrary to all common human decency? A good documentary about the making of Breaking the Rules might perhaps provide a useful record of the decay of intelligence and sanity in our time.
Brother Sun, Sister Moon
(Directed by Franco Zeffirelli; starring Graham Faulkner, Alec Guinness; 1973)
Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon is a big, limp Valentine of a movie, filled with an excess of sweetness and light. What a shame. His subject is Francis of Assisi, one of the most interesting and natural of saints, but Zeffirelli has portrayed him as sort of the first flower child.
Well, maybe he was. It may be true that Francis went out into the fields and spoke to the birds. But is it true, as Zeffirelli seems to believe, that the birds had more to say than Francis did? He hardly gives us six lines of intelligent or perceptive dialogue in the movie; the rest is empty, pretty phrasing. After a while we long for a cynic to wander into the movie and ask Francis a few pointed questions.
The movie shows every sign of having been taken apart and put back together again. The opening—a rambling, confused editing job—looks as if it’s meant to cover up for an original beginning that ran too long. While Francis tosses and turns on his bed, we get flashbacks to a field of battle and memories of how he went off to be a soldier. The task of a movie’s first ten minutes, at the very least, is to orient us and give us a general idea of what to expect. Brother Sun, Sister Moon opens on confusion and complexity, which is bad enough; what’s worse is that once the opening is out of the way, the movie levels off into one note, indefinitely held.