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The New Morality, analyzed along the lines of Renoir's Règle query: Do these people go too far, or not far enough? The Counterculture is a mountain retreat specializing in nude yoga, the outsiders are a bourgie documentarian (Robert Culp) and his wife (Natalie Wood), introduced in the middle of a marathon of New Age oozing. Declaring themselves liberated from norms, they mix beads and turtlenecks, pass the ganja pipe around, and replace conventional filters with touchy-feely ones. ("I feel we're sharing something very beautiful," she beams after listening to his extramarital confession.) The faddish lingo reaches the Beverly Hills couple's friends (Elliott Gould, Dyan Cannon), who are startled, mortified, curious. Benignly erected on knowing observation and flossy anecdote, Paul Mazursky's cultural mood-ring finds its rhythm in lengthy scenes that zigzag with cabaret timing. The bedroom duet between an irritable Cannon and a horned-up Gould segues into the wife's psychiatry session, where she goes through an entire glossary of Freudian slips before the shrink's Mock Turtle gaze. "Oh my God! Insight." Faced with real-world application of free-love philosophy, Culp's wannabe hepcat squirms from anger to bewilderment to self-induced mellowness before being able to share a glass of scotch with the tennis instructor he caught in Wood's boudoir. (His advice to the tempted colleague: "You got the guilt anyway, man. Don't waste it.") Faces and Alice's Restaurant chart a similar trajectory, Mazursky steers it to a Las Vegas hotel room and Gould's slump-shouldered little sigh as he climbs onto the bed where his mate-swapping buds await. "It's only a physical thing," but is it? The aborted orgy spills into the Strip to be bathed in Burt Bacharach and ask, like Godard's concurrent collages, what the hell happened to the revolution. With Greg Mullavey, Horst Ebersberg, K.T. Stevens, Lee Bergere, and Donald F. Muhich.
--- Fernando F. Croce |