Terribly fey romantic fantasy by Alan Rudolph. The opening sequence apparently wants to plug in to the Capra-esque Forties, but, although Timothy Hutton makes a good likeness of Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart, the high-contrast black-and-white is too arty and artificial for total comfort. Then it's straight up to Heaven -- and a switch to chalky, soft-focus color -- where the residents toy with powers such as telepathy, teleportation, aerial flotation, etc., while waiting to be sent back to Earth to begin again as infants. Both these sections are pretty poky about setting up the crucial race-against-time whereby the hero has to locate on Earth the perfect mate he had met in Heaven. This assignment is made easier since they each look the same in their next lives as in their last ones (humanity, evidently, is composed of a finite number of infinitely recycled physical types). And then, too, the rules of the game are never very clearly spelled out. There is a good stretch of a couple of minutes or so when Rudolph, feelingly and with first-hand knowledge, evokes the engagé Sixties. But he is by temperament too cool to give much credence to the romantic idealism. With Kelly McGillis, Maureen Stapleton, and Don Murray. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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