Financial Times (London,England)

July 22, 1993, Thursday

From Twin Peaks to a trough of tedium

By STEPHEN AMIDON

STORYVILLE (15)

Mark Frost

TANGO (15)
Patrice Laconte

BAMBI (U)    Walt Disney
As one of the principal writers of Twin Peaks and Hill Street Blues, Mark Frost was responsible for some of the more daring and accomplished work to hit the small screen in recent years. It is therefore a surprise and a disappointment that his movie debut, Storyville, should be an anaemic formula thriller, lacking the dramatic drive and quirky detail of his previous work.
Set in and about New Orleans, Storyville concerns itself with Cray Fowler, a young lawyer from a wealthy Louisiana dynasty who is running for Congress. His ill-considered tryst with sexy karate instructor Lee (Charlotte Lewis) lands him in big trouble when her pimp father is murdered after secretly filming them making steam in a jacuzzi. Lee is accused of the crime and Cray decides to defend her, in the process uncovering some disturbing facts about his own father’s death. Murder, mayhem and scandal ensue, resulting in a courtroom scene that ends in a slow motion gunfight (including the judge) just as the plot teeters on the edge of pure confusion.

Storyville starts out looking like a hot-blooded Southern political thriller, thought it soon loses its way, branching out to include racial politics, murky family relations, Vietnam atrocities, oil scandals, even transvestitism. Frost as director proves to be competent if a bit slow, though as a writer he seems not to understand that a 100-minute movie requires more discipline than a television series. Every time the movie threatens to become comprehensible Frost switches tracks. There are so many loose ends here that it winds up resembling a ball of yarn after being discovered by a kitten. After a while you feel that there is really no reason to pay attention.
As for the cast, some turn in stridently hammy performances, such as Jason Robards as a drunken family patriarch and Piper Laurie, who behaves as if she had just wandered in from a Tennessee Williams play. Others, like Spader and Joanna Whalley-Kilmer as a tough lawyer, merely look stricken. The film’s only bright spot is the presence of Michael Warren and Charles Haid, the duo who played Hill and Renko on Hill Street Blues. Haid is robustly vulgar as a pornographer, while Warren, balding gracefully, sums up proceedings best of all when he proclaims that ‘there’s a mighty big turd in the punch bowl.’
If Frost’s film wanders off down too many thematic avenues, then Patrice Leconte’s Tango suffers from the opposite fate. Early on, it promises to be a fulsome black comedy examining that dark part of every married man’s psyche that wishes for his wife to be out of the picture – permanently. But after sounding this intriguing and potentially resonant note, Leconte bangs away at it until it rings hollow.
The film deals with Paul (Thierry Lhermitte), a philandering husband whose wife turns the tables on him when she finds out about his cheating. She has a very public affair, then leaves him. At first he thinks her absence is a blessing, but he soon discovers that he cannot be happy as long as he knows that she is off betraying him somewhere.
He asks the advice of his confirmed bachelor uncle (Philippe Noiret), who suggests that Paul should kill her, reasoning that a being a widower is a lot less taxing on the mind than being divorced. They hire Vincent (Richard Bohringer) to do the job, who several years earlier had killed his own wife when he discovered her infidelity. The three set off on a search for their prey that will eventually lead them to Africa, where Paul’s wife is working for a medical charity.
Leconte’s previous films, especially Monsieur Hire and The Hairdresser’s Husband, were exquisite blends of Gallic whimsy and real feeling that were able to catch the viewer off-guard without ever alienating him. And for its first half-hour Tango promises to do the same, captivating us with a brand of dark comedy that manages to be charming in spite of its seemingly unpleasant subject matter. The best scenes are the opening ones, in which Vincent, a skywriter, is cuckolded by a wife who watches him paint the sky while she is with her lover. Vincent suspects something is up and tries to spy on her, but she realises that he is nearby upon seeing that the skywriting is not his.
However, such wonderfully inventive moments cannot sustain what is a rather flimsy film. By the midway point Leconte seems to run out of ideas and starts repeating himself. The film loses its freshness, it stops surprising us and descends into a sort of manic predictability that leaves the viewer cold. There is a pointless fight with a truck driver, a senseless sequence of aerial acrobatics with two teenage girls. Even a cameo by Carole Bouquet seems artificial, her cool beauty serving as an illustration to the director’s thematic agenda rather than an alluring summons into the heart of the film. With Tango, the music stops long before the dancing is over.
*****
I wonder, if Bambi were made today and given a Royal Premiere, which member of the gun-toting, blood-sporting Windsors would dare show their face and thereby risk being set upon by an audience of children hungry for revenge? Actually, they need not worry – by today’s standards of cartoon carnage, Bambi’s off-screen violence will probably fail to raise many young eyebrows, whereas 50 years ago it sent kids and parents alike blubbing from the theatre.
Although it remains far better than most things for children, it must be admitted that Bambi is not always up to Disney’s high standards, somehow just missing that blend of humour, sentimentality and menace that made other Disney animated films so great. And I wonder how many parents are up to explaining to their five-year-olds what all those couples of rabbits and skunks were hurrying off to do during the spring sequence? Still, anyone who has to read a review to decide whether or not to see Bambi either has no kids or does not pay any attention to them.