The Unbelievable Truth

For a movie that was filmed in 11 days on a shoestring budget by a first-time director in Long Island, The Unbelievable Truth is an entirely decent piece of work. Actually, it looks good by anybody’s budget.

This movie is part of an inspiring trend among young American independent filmmakers, who aren’t waiting for Hollywood to call. They’re making movies for themselves. Hal Hartley, the writer-director of The Unbelievable Truth, made his film for around $20,000 (small beer by Hollywood standards), but it turned out just fine, and the movie is all his.

The story, and Hartley’s style, embody some drop-dead hip attitudes. We meet a teenager (Adrienne Shelly) preoccupied with anxiety about a coming nuclear war. As she is trying to decide between college and a modeling career (both irrelevant, because the world won’t exist six months from now), a stranger comes into her life.

But he (Robert Burke) is no stranger to the town. He has been in prison for years, rumored to have killed a man. He goes to work in an auto garage owned by the girl’s excitable father (Christopher Cooke). Mysteriously, like a character out of Twin Peaks, she steals the stranger’s wrench and carries it around in her purse.

The film is full of absurdist tangents. A sample exchange of dialogue occurs between the girl and the daughter (Julia McNeal) of the man murdered years before:

“He seems like a nice man.”

“You think so? Even though he killed your father and your sister?”

“People make mistakes.”

For my taste, the film’s unceasing archness becomes monotonous, as though it were overly pleased by its own cleverness. Hartley doesn’t seem to have the sneaky depth of feeling that characterizes the films of Jim Jarmusch (Mystery Train), who works in a similar style.

Still, Hartley has made a great-looking movie, he’s put together a few fine running gags, and his eye for actors is excellent. Burke is a hunk in the making, while Shelly and McNair have beautiful, haunting faces. This director will be heard from again.

First published in The Herald, August 3, 1990

This was the first of Hartley’s indie successes. I guess I wish his career had been more consistent, but he’s certainly gone his own way, and I was moved by some of the action in Ned Rifle (2014), the most recent title of his I’ve seen. I don’t know what happened to Julia McNeal, but the cast also included Edie Falco, Matt Malloy, and Kelly Reichardt. I remember interviewing Hartley once at the University Bar & Grill on “The Ave” in Seattle, and he really liked my sunglasses; I had actually spent some money on them, which is unlike me, and I lost them soon after.

Vamp

Vampire comedies are all the rage, it seems, although only last summer’s Fright Night was a worthy entry in the subgenre (Love at First Bite and Once Bitten are among the more debased representatives). Now comes Vamp, which attempts a more stylish tack than most, but suffers from a thinning familiarity.

Coupla guys at a boondocks college need to drive into town one night to procure a stripper for a frat party. They borrow a car from a rich kid (who insists on tagging along). Nothing unusual there, except these guys stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time: the After Dark club, after dark.

The joint, it turns out, is crawling with vampires, and the queen of ’em all is a supple dancer (Grace Jones) who wears a wire bikini over leopardskin body paint. When she asks what the boys in the back room will have, they naturally answer: her.

She has a surprise for them; she loves the hemoglobin of college guys. After she drains the essence out of one of the kids, the hero (Chris Makepeace) just wants to get out of the place, while the third-wheel rich kid (Gedde Watanabe of Gung Ho in another amusing performance) is busy ogling the girls on the runway.

This film has some silly zip in its early reels, considerably buoyed by the zombified dance routine by Grace Jones, who wears (with the aforementioned costume) red geisha hair and blue contact lenses. It’s just hubba-hubba enough to nudge the boundaries of the R rating.

Director/co-screenwriter Richard Wenk clearly wants Vamp to have some visual style, so he tries to inject some by flooding the dark milieu with green and purple lights. Unfortunately, an armful of filters and gels do not a visual style make.

Most of the gags are tired, too. By now the jokes about stakes in the heart have been heard; and Wenk can’t marry the goofy stuff to the scary vampirization of some of his main characters.

He clearly intended a black comedy, though; in fact his model seems to have been not Love at First Bite but After Hours, Martin Scorsese’s nightmare comedy about a one-nighter gone bad. Wenk achieves a comic-horror balance once in a while. When Sandy Baron, as the club owner, wistfully muses about opening a vampire lounge in Las Vegas, it’s a good freaky moment.

Then there’s Grace Jones, who isn’t really in the movie much (although she’s been emphasized in the film’s ad campaign). She’s otherworldly enough to carry this sort of thing off, and the movie wimps out a bit when she’s not around. Wenk could have learned something about visual style from her; a smooth, hard enigma, she seems to exist – even in appearances “as herself” on talk shows – purely as an exotic figure of style.

First published in The Herald, July 25, 1986

Always nice to have a Sandy Baron reference. Also in the movie: Dedee Pfeiffer, Francie Swift, and Billy Drago. (“Dedee, meet Gedde. Gedde, Dedee.”) As for Wenk, since his screenplay 16 Blocks was filmed in 2006, he’s gotten a lot of writing work on action pictures. The trivia on IMDb claims Grace Jones’ stripper chair involved creative input from Dolph Lundgren and Keith Haring.

Valmont

Over the years, there have been many examples of different film versions of the same story. For instance, Frankenstein is remade regularly, and did you know that The Maltese Falcon had been filmed twice before its classic 1941 version hit the screen?

But rarely has a novel been adapted twice, with major productions, in such proximity to each other as Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the 1781 novel by Choderlos de Laclos, which was filmed last year as Dangerous Liaisons, starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

While Dangerous Liaisons was being filmed, so was Valmont, a version of the same story, adapted by Jean-Claude Carriere and directed by Milos Forman. Forman, the man who made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, is notorious for his painstaking approach to filmmaking. Valmont has been in production for years, and he could hardly have been thrilled when Dangerous Liaisons, released last Christmas, did nicely at the box office and was honored with a batch of Oscar nominations.

But it is always interesting to see how two different directors will treat the same story. Liaisons director Stephen Frears found a cool, brisk style with which to chart the devious doings of the sexually adventurous aristocrats. Forman is more deliberate, opulent, and romantic. The emotional life of these characters is closer to the surface.

Valmont (Colin Firth, of Apartment Zero) is a well-traveled seducer. But the purity of the married Madame de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) has him stymied. He cannot seem to break her down. And, in the process, his heart may be moving a bit.

“Can a man change?” he asks his confidante and soulmate, the widow Madame de Merteuil (Annette Bening). “Yes, for the worse,” she tells him, a typically terrible response. Madame de Merteuil is the hard diamond that keeps Valmont ticking. Her wicked plots trap everyone in her web. To strike back at her lover (Jeffrey Jones), a nobleman who plans to marry an adolescent virgin (Fairuza Balk), Merteuil enlists Valmont in a scheme to deflower the girl. Meanwhile, she bets him her own favors that he can’t bed down with the angelic de Tourvel.

Fans of Dangerous Liaisons will recognize the characters, but Valmont is different in detail and motivations. Forman’s film is more expensively lush and has more warmth, although I think the film takes an odd turn in its last act, and has at its core too great an enigma surrounding the character of Madame de Merteuil.

Forman’s tendency to cast lesser-known actors works nicely. Firth makes a more dashing Valmont than John Malkovich, although Malkovich’s performance seemed more charged and daring. But that may be because Valmont is almost a secondary character here; Madame de Merteuil is the central figure, and newcomer Annette Bening makes the most of the role. Bening, oval-faced and even-voiced, takes command of every scene she is in. We will be seeing more of her.

First published in The Herald, January 14, 1990

I would like to see this again. It certainly has a bunch of good people at an interesting moment. Bening’s next film was The Grifters. Firth and Tilly began a relationship on this movie that included having a child together. Strange to think that this was Forman’s follow-up to Amadeus, and he only made three features after.