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Henry Jaglom's technique eschews elegance and still conjures up a lithe and bright tango, a sort of romantic Wesselmann. A street band plays the titular tune, a candid tracking shot follows Karen Black down the sidewalks of Manhattan, lost in thought. Her husband has just left her, at the café she garbles the menu while ordering chocolate, the divorced neurotic (Michael Emil) starts a conversation ("Do you know there's a tremendous relationship between sneezing and having orgasms?") that's continued in her apartment. Albee's The Zoo as grubby rom-com is the basis, Minnie and Moskowitz and A Perfect Couple are Los Angeles precursors. The protagonists arguing outside a repertory theater are filmed with a long lens to capture the extras standing in line and enjoying the spectacle, a few seconds of The Band Wagon fill the screen to mate Technicolor and grain. "You seem to have a lot of energy, and it gets stuck in your forehead." There's a pigeon trained like a falcon by a would-be lothario (Michael Margotta), a frizzy Larry David defining happiness as a free taxi ride anywhere, Orson Welles the puffy magician in a TV clip doing a double-takes at a llama. Rimsky-Korsakov al fresco, home movies, "Just the Way You Look Tonight." Above all, the couple's defiantly abrasive, emotive bariolage in the face of urban loneliness, "I'd talk just as if I were writing lyrics, or something." The peculiar chasms are pulled together into the image of Black wielding a microphone before a brick wall marked "improvisation," neatly summarizing the Jaglom aesthetic—it shouldn't work, it's much too seedy and shambling, and yet can't you hear the music? With Martin Harvey Friedberg, Frances Fisher, and Robert Hallak.
--- Fernando F. Croce |