THE SILVER SCREEN This is art imitating the psychopathology of everyday life

by Ivan Martinson

The Moderns

a film by Alan Rudolph (at The Egyptian)

Linda Fiorentino.

I like Alan Rudolph's films, films like Choose Me, with lots of characters, all of them equally rich in personality and egoism. No one is entirely peripheral; these people have selves and see themselves as central to the larger world. This is mimetic; this is art imitating the psychopathology of everyday life.

In The Moderns, Rudolph treats Paris in 1926 as though it were Los Angeles, his usual stomping grounds. Chic, shallow people grub for money and prestige in the worlds of art and society. Americans cut each other dead everywhere. Tourists from Ohio are intrigued to see Hemingway strung out on absinthe in a bistro: "You see that guy? I think he wrote a book," says one. "Fitzgerald?" "That's it.

Continued from previous page.

I'm just trying to be realistic. I try to let the material shape itself. I don't want to shape the material. I don't want to impose my view. Let's just say I'm very concerned.

I think in terms of how the global perspectives and how it affects people in say, Seattle, or the United States. I think that the response on a federal level is one of the most pathetic. But I think that there are many more individuals who make every effort to work, like at the GHMC [Gay Health and Medical Clinic]. The work of Shanti.

I think the AIDS issue certainly could

It's Fitzgerald."

Keith Carradine, he of the jack-knife jawline and jaded eyes, plays Nick Hart, who paints and starves. His gallery owner, Libby (Genevieve Bujold), a former nun, has lined up a commission: He is to copy three great paintings (Cezanne, Matisse, Modigliani) for aristocratic Nathalie (Geraldine Chaplin, whose gaunt features and aging neck have landed her in a rut, lately, of portraying elegant sleazeballs) who is trying to pull a fast one on her husband.

Hart is distracted from such gainful employment, however, by the arrival of his long-forgotten wife, Rachel (ravenhaired Linda Fiorentino, whose character seems to have been modeled on blond Zelda Fitzgerald), presently married to sadistic millionaire Stone (John Lone, the cutest thing in the movie after that Modigliani). The characters are rounded out by writers, witty Wallace Shawn as a suicidal gossip columnist, Kevin J. O'Connor as the lush, young Hemingway (Ernest should only have been this pretty), and Elsa Raven and Ali Giron as Gertrude and Alice, inevitably, who eighty-six Hart for picking a fight with Stone in their atelier.

But the plot, garish and detailed as it is (and as Rudolph is famous for), is only an excuse in The Moderns for a lot of scenic and sarcastic jokes at the espense of Art and Love and Paris. Naked revelers (even men, full-front) stagger through Montmartre after a night-long binge. Stone slashes paintings when they fail to impress his guests and is brutal to his wife in bed, or rather bathtub. Critics, always a popular target, are easily convinced genuine paintings are frauds. Wallace Shawn, who is funny-looking enough as a man, somehow acquires the panache and the wardrobe to bring off a drag sequence that deceives the manhood of Paris.

What I loved about the movie were the tricks. I love to be tricked when it's elegantly done. There are the classic, tinted shots of Old Paree that frame much of the movie and.segue into the story. (Today's Paris is not dingy enough to seem atmospheric to anyone used to LA.) There are the backgrounds in the windows of Nathalie's limousine, all of them cityscapes in cubist oils. There are curious shots of John Lone falling into the Seine and rising into the heavens. And there is Hemingway, far more drunk and depressed than he got until several marriages later, writing his own version of the tale of Hart and Rachel and getting the names of the real people mixed up with those of his characters. (Writers do this all the time, sometimes.)

At the end, of course, everyone runs off to Hollywood, ostensibly to make money, but reality concoct typically Alan Rudolph scenarios. A few last jabs at art experts are supposed to make some kind of point, but I couldn't tell you what it was. I forgot The Moderns the instant I came out of it, but for two hours I was in Paris in the Twenties, and we can all use a cheap and exhilarating vacation now and then.

have been handled much better. I think it is unnecessary that it became an issue when people refocused their anger solely on homosexuals and IV drug users. And I think that's not the issue, obviously. I think that everyone shares a com-

mon concern.

Helplessness or the feeling of helplessness is counterproductive. At least if you're able to act, you should act and do something about it. In the '60s, people used to say, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

EG: What are your future plans? GC: I'm going to continue my efforts as a filmmaker and I plan to pursue both feature films and documentaries.

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