Financial Times (London,England)

February 20, 1992, Thursday

Psychodrama turns soft

STEPHEN AMIDON

THE PRINCE OF TIDES (15) Odeon Leicester Square

RAISE THE RED LANTERN Chelsea Cinema, Metro, Renoir

FATHER OF THE BRIDE (PG) Odeon Marble Arch

AFRAID OF THE DARK (18) Camden Plaza, Cannon Haymarket

UNE HISTOIRE INVENTE National Film Theatre

The Prince of Tides is a startling hybrid of a movie, a Freudian weepie in which syrupy melodrama and sombre psychoanalysis uneasily coincide. Based on Pat Conroy’s bestselling novel, it tells the story of an emotionally impacted teacher (Nick Nolte) who travels from his native South Carolina to New York City to be with his twin sister after she attempts suicide. There, he forms a strained alliance with his sister’s shrink (Barbra Streisand, who also directs) as they try to discover what caused the girl to slash her wrists. It soon becomes clear that Nolte, whose marriage and career are on the rocks, is just as badly in need of help as his sibling, sharing with her an emotionally crippling upbringing. The remainder of the film involves Streisand leading Nolte through the swampy waters of his past, uncovering an abusive father, a neurotic mother, a Vietnam vet brother who dies in a shoot-out with the police and, ultimately, a Big Traumatic Event that is the key to everything. Along the way, psychiatrist and patient fall in love, a relationship that deepens when it becomes clear that the doctor suffers from some pretty hefty psychic wounds herself. Together, they goad one another toward their respective cures, each prodding the other into facing themselves while providing a shoulder to cry on once the leap is made. Despite tons of earnestness and some fine touches, Streisand is never really able to balance the two very different currents at work in The Prince of Tides, making for choppy waters all the way. The sweet romance of the love affair seems distinctly at odds with the tension of the confessional sequences – the viewer is left reeling when Nolte and Streisand go from a combative therapy session to the corner table at a French restaurant without even changing their clothes. Ultimately, something has to give. Not surprisingly, it is the psychodrama, as the last half-hour of the film abandons all pretence of being a carefully wrought study of the psyche’s dark side to become a feel-good flick full of hugging, rainbows and reconciliation. The movie’s failure to sustain its early tone can be seen most clearly in Nolte’s performance, which is robust, ironic and tortured for most of the film, yet evaporates after he gets his problems off his chest. It is impossible to believe that the complex, fiery character he plays at first can turn into a big, doughy palooka that easily. You feel cheated, as if the film-makers were more interested in having a happy, healed-up ending than in maintaining the story’s credibility. Tellingly, the film’s best performances – Blythe Danner as Nolte’s fed-up wife and Kate Nelligan as his social-climbing mother – occur when characters refuse to take the talking cure, when they retain an aura of ambiguity and mystery. Streisand would have done better to put less effort into trying to make her hero (and the audience) feel so good. After all, what makes for good psychiatry does not necessarily make for good drama. Nobody tries to rescue the feelings of the main characters in Raise the Red Lantern, a bleak and beautiful film from China that depicts how the individual can be corrupted when living under a barbaric system. Set in the 1920s, it tells the story of Songlian (Gong Li), a 19-year-old student who is forced to leave her university studies to marry a rich old man. To make matters worse, her cold-hearted husband already has three wives, and Songlian is forced to submit to the horrific household routine in which he indicates his sleeping preferences for the night by lighting red lantern outside the chosen wife’s residence. Needless to say, this system makes for pitched in-fighting among the women, conflict Songlian quickly becomes all too adept at, leading to a tragic finale of death and madness. Director Zhang Yimou has moulded this dark, simple tale into a hauntingly resonant film. Starting slowly, he painstakingly accumulates mood and detail to turn domestic drama into full-blown tragedy. Yimou has an exquisite sense of menace, evoking it from such minutiae as the sound of a pair of shears as they cut hair. His snowy, insulated household is claustrophobic and ripe for tragedy, like some eastern Elsinore. The director is greatly aided by the remarkable Gong Li, who perfectly embodies the torment of a spirited woman forced to fight within the boundaries of a social system she knows will ultimately crush her. Marriage of a more benign sort is the subject in Father of the Bride, a spiritless remake of the 1950 Vincente Minelli favourite. Steve Martin reprises the Spencer Tracy role as a father who is forced to run a gamut of emotions after learning that his only daughter wants to fly the nest. Martin struggles heroically in the lead, his face a map of bemused anguish and bittersweet pride as he tries to accept his daughter’s impending marriage. Unfortunately, he is let down by the remainder of the cast, particularly the strangely detached Diane Keaton as his wife and the usually hilarious Martin Short, who squanders his role as the wedding co-ordinator by trying too hard for laughs. Director Charles Shyer is content to keep things as maudlin and innocuous as possible, stringing together a series of tired jokes and emotional cliches. The film’s climactic sequence has all the poignancy and originality of a very expensive home video. People who cry at weddings might find something to like here, but for the rest of us it is like falling face-first into the cake. Mark Peploe’s Afraid of the Dark is a potentially fascinating study of a young boy’s troubled mind that never really comes together. It tells the story of Lucas (Ben Keyworth), an 11-year-old who appears to be playing junior sleuth in order to protect his blind mother (Fanny Ardant) from a slasher who has been preying on blind people in his neighbourhood. It eventually becomes clear, however, that the boy’s imagination is the motivating force behind the drama, fuelled by his own anxieties at the prospect of eye surgery. You could see how this sort of dark psychodrama could have worked under the direction of, say, Nick Roeg, but Peploe, a veteran screenwriter, is insufficiently steady behind the camera to bring it off. His vision is too fragmented, too personal to entice the viewer. As a result, the film is torpid instead of moody, with surprisingly wooden performances by the usually useful James Fox and Paul McGann. The only real tension comes from a distinctly unpleasant suspicion that the boy might do injury to his baby sister with a knitting-needle. Another film ill served by its maker’s idiosyncratic style is Andre Forcier’s Une Histoire Invente. Set in contemporary Montreal, it tells the story of a mother (Louise Marleau) and daughter (Charlotte Laurier) engaged in sexual competition for the attention of an ageing jazzman (Jean Lapointe), known rather incredibly as ‘the Don Juan of the trumpet’. All the elements are in place for a witty farce – a potentially fruitful central plot that pits an ageing siren against her vampish daughter, supported by a host of crazy minor players, including a Bible-bashing bassist and a sentimental cop who uses his handcuffs to bring lovers together. But Forcier is never able to establish a comic tone to the piece, veering wildly between gross caricature and stylised pathos, as well as trying to maintain a series of running gags that usually stumble and occasionally fall.