WELCOME TO L.A. (Alan Rudolph, 1976)

Robert Altman protégé Alan Rudolph’s deeply affecting noirish comic rondelay about loneliness and musical beds in Los Angeles, “the city of the one-night stands,” surveys to devastating effect heavily tread-upon hopes, desire, vulnerability. At the center of the film is Carroll Barber, beautifully played by Keith Carradine, who has returned to L.A. after a three years’ absence to visit his millionaire father, a businessman, and to write songs for Eric Wood, who is recording them for an album. Wood is played by Richard Baskin, the real composer/lyricist of the moody contemporary folksy blues that gorgeously punctuate the film’s soundtrack—this, a piece of the self-reflective mosaic of sexual betrayals that zigs and zags Altmaniacally among a wealth of interesting, diverse characters.
     Indeed, mirrors throughout fragment characters visually; at one point, five images of one character appear in a single frame. A supernally clean, clear mirror generates a confrontation between Susan Moore, Carroll’s agent and former lover (he has moved on; she can’t), and her own image that prefaces her freefall into insanity, signaled by her looking at us and laughing. Viveca Lindfors is brilliant in her portrait of dead-end erotic obsession. At the tail end of a number of other scenes, one character or another also fleetingly looks at us. This is another of Rudolph’s methods for suggesting the fracture of a personality. Moreover, we are reminded of the freeze frame that concludes François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), where a teenager who has fled from a juvenile detention center looks directly at us who so want to help him but cannot traverse the boundary between reality and cinema to do so. Neither can we assist Rudolph’s poignant characters.
     Highlight: A man is suddenly overwhelmed by the weight of the adultery he contemplates committing.

WETHERBY (David Hare, 1985)

Playwright David Hare’s first film as director, in this case from his original script (in the shadow of Pinter), is a shattering thing to return to after twenty years. Moreover, Hare may have given the greatest English-language film actress of the past half-century, Vanessa Redgrave, her greatest role (best actress, National Society of Film Critics): Jean Travers, the persevering schoolteacher whose “fake cheerfulness” echoes that of Prime Minister Thatcher, and who harbors some envy for the pupil of hers who runs away—from Wetherby, the small town in which nothing happens and education seems pointless.
     The spouse of Jean’s closest friend says this about Thatcher, metaphors for whom the film conjures: “She’s taking some terrible revenge for something, and now the whole country is suffering.” (We U.S. Americans during the fake presidency of a likely insane George W. Bush can surely relate.) This gentleman also offers this counsel: “If you’re frightened by loneliness, never get married.”
     Jean herself is terribly lonely and haunted by the past. Years ago the boy she loved was murdered while in the service. Now another boy, 25-year-old John Morgan, a graduate student, has entered her life, conning his way into her dinner party and sending her defenses into overdrive by privately expressing their kinship of loneliness, which for several reasons she is driven to deny. The next day Morgan brings her two pheasants, she invites him in, he confesses he knew no one else at dinner the night before and then blows out his brains at Jean’s kitchen table. The police investigator, a former lover of Jean’s, has an ax to grind and his own loneliness.
     Hare weaves a fascinating fabric of past and present; some juxtapositions of different time elements startle, illuminate.
     Did Wetherby influence Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003)?