A Safe Place

So full of obnoxious, pseudo-spiritual hippie bullshit it hurts. Tuesday Weld is the most infuriating Manic Pixie Dream Girl ever and... FOR FUCK'S SAKE is she on a rocking horse now!? Fucking hell... At least it has Orson Welles intently staring down a gorilla and telling it to disappear.

The most experimental of the BBS films, and easily the worst, Jaglom's debut employs fragmented Godardian style montage and time shifting devices to explore the dreamy interiority of a conflicted beauty. Welles is a hoot as the eccentric and mysterious magician, but Jaglom is so enamoured with Weld's appearance that it overwhelms the material to the point of tedium. And the self conscious formalism quickly loses its novelty and becomes an albatross around his neck.

A hopelessly self-indulgent mess - makes you realise that love or hate Godard (who Jaglom is clearly influenced by), he does have a grip on form and rhythm which is almost completely absent here. Numbing, pretentious monologues alternate with numbing, pretentious abstract images; it's difficult to know (or care) what point Jaglom is trying to make. Some amusing moments with Welles (and the striking image of a levitating silver ball) are the only scant pleasures.

Bold yet unilluminating. Everything about the telling of this story is out of whack, and its experimental editing is only a partial excuse. Welles's and Nicholson's performances strike me as inappropriate. Self-consciously meaningful dialogues veer wildly between the baffling and the crushingly obvious. Jaglom may be banking on the audience being enamored of Weld, who is charming but hardly unforgettable. Her struggle to choose between two lovers comes a day late and a dollar short.

There's a moment about ten or so minutes in when Welles says "Disappear," and that's kind of what I hoped the movie would do. Not even the many closeups of Weld is worth this pseudo-intellectual romp through the worst parts of the free love generation. Several moments *could* have been good but everything just winds up feeling completely phony.

Orson Welles lives up to his character: he is truly magical, and the ONLY reason to watch this. Thank god Jaglom later learned some things about basics of moviemaking...I'm often a fan. One feels sorry for Phil Proctor...he must need some pussy BAD to put up with Tuesday Weld's endless drivel. She has lines like, "This is my magic box...you put something in it", delivered straight, then practically has orgasms over telephone exchanges. At least Jack Nicholson gets her to shut up now and then.

The associative editing, her meetings with an old "wise" magician and use of contrasting classic songs like La mer work well to convey Weld's longing for past magical times. It doesn't help that she is an obnoxious Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who's mediocre acted by Tuesday Weld. Jack Nicholson also appears as a slick former or future lover (making out the timelines in this is very hard). It's great that Jaglom basically lets Welles be Welles doing magic tricks and staring down animals in a zoo.

Tiresome

Star Rating: No Stars

New American Cinema.

I feel like Jaglom tried so hard to make his film seem more interesting than it actually is with the chaotic editing. I guess the concept behind the editing is interesting, but it never even hit me till I heard Jaglom talk about it on one of the disc's supplements. Nothing about this movie particularly impressed me. I like the way Jack Nicholson and Orson Welles randomly appear, but neither turn in their best work.

A romance made unique by its perspective. Hallucinatory and feverish editing turn it into something that resembles the fragmentary time and space of the protagonist's own unsettled mind. I really fell in love with this during the second half.