A mustache-on-Mona-Lisa movie about the Parisian smart set of the 1920s, and about the shift of fashion (nothing more permanent than that) that would draw the gaze of the world toward Hollywood and toward pictures that move rather than those that just hang there. In this last twilit tour of the sights, you are taken round to the literary cafés where patrons jot and doodle, are given entrée into the salon of Gertrude Stein, and repair to the boxing gym where disagreements may be settled as by men -- the sort of men, at any rate, who hang around with Ernest Hemingway. (Hemingway himself will be overheard in midcourse of his search for le mot juste: "Paris is just a portable banquet.") Not because this is Paris, but because it's an Alan Rudolph movie, there is also the eternal heartbeat of romance -- a heartbeat somewhat slow and irregular (because, again, it's an Alan Rudolph movie), as if in need of an electrical pacemaker. And there is nothing else unusual enough here, despite the unusual attractiveness of the subject-matter, to narrow the gap between the two principal camps around Rudolph: those who think he's very cool and those who think he's too cool. Admittedly, the movie has a pervasive style, which, in league with golden hazes and an affectedly unconcerned camera and the relentless log-sawing soundtrack of New Age composer Mark Isham (who should certainly be able to get an ample album out of it), sets up its own special world and draws you into it. But this, a high compliment in many circumstances, would be more of a one if what you were being drawn into were something besides a somnambulistic trance. Keith Carradine, Linda Fiorentino, John Lone. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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