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John Sayles in Hollywood, the '60s in the rearview mirror and the Brat Pack just around the corner. New Jersey ca. 1967, with high school as a cauldron of clashing backgrounds and the last safety zone. The middle-class princess (Rosanna Arquette) and the brilliantined ruffian (Vincent Spano), one lies in bed daydreaming to "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" and the other sweeps into the cafeteria to "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City." ("Strangers in the Night" unites them.) She recites Saroyan onstage, he prowls the halls like one of Fellini's vitelloni, two self-theatricalizing creatures crossing paths long enough to demonstrate the social realities that usually get left out of teen love stories. One's graduation is another's bungled greaser robbery, she heads out to college (and the counterculture) while he takes up lip-synching at a Miami nightclub. Reunion is bittersweet, brutal, defiantly hopeful. "Your instincts are good, but you gotta learn to listen." Characters caught between emotional planes, a director suspended between independent expression and studio expectation. Working with formula, Sayles foregrounds cultural tensions and avails himself of the grit of Michael Ballhaus' camera, growing more confident with moody movement, editing as shifts in feeling, the impressionistic potential of music. Through it all runs Arquette like a sneaky drop of mercury, one moment acquiescing to Spano's bullish courting and the next raucously drunk with Matthew Modine, adding the extra grain of flakiness that lifts her character out of standard coed coltishness. A patchy romance full of vividly smudged emotions, the oddball couple at the prom soon to be replete with John Hughes cartoons. With Joanna Merlin, Jack Davidson, Nick Ferrari, Dolores Messina, Tracy Pollan, Bill Raymond, Marta Kober, Liane Curtis, and Sam McMurray.
--- Fernando F. Croce |