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A whole lifetime in four days, the mystery of romance "pure and absolute." The Italian war bride in rural Iowa while the clan is away, cf. Magnani in The Rose Tattoo or The Fugitive Kind, Meryl Streep with a thousand instinctive gestures. "Casta Diva" is answered by blues, the visitor (Clint Eastwood) is a globetrotting National Geographic photojournalist radiating gentle masculinity. Iced tea gives way to dinner, flirtation becomes dance. The stroll on the titular structure follows Streep's Roman profile in and out of darkness as she peers between boards at the stranger setting up his tripod, a sequence adduced from Lean's A Passage to India. All is discovered by the heroine's adult children some three decades later. "Now I find out that in between bake sales, my mother was Anaïs Nin." It would be Eastwood, wouldn't it, who scans the pages of a supermarket novel and finds the Dreyer of Gertrud. Yeats under the moonlight, private notes next to Byron verses. An adulterous wife enters the diner and is bathed in communal scorn, she's glimpsed weeping alone in her car, a concise sketch of "this American family ethic." (The next generation's prosaic prudishness further accents the love for couples over families, as McCarey would have it.) The brush of a hand against a knee, the summer breeze interrupted by bugs, the tactile eroticism of bathwater, an exquisite sensory delicacy throughout. The decisions that enliven you and the decisions that destroy you, "no imposed morality." Emotion is kept at bay and then it floods in, wrenchingly, the heartbeat of a red turn signal during a lachrymose downpour—possibly Eastwood's most visceral filmmaking. "The old dreams... were good dreams. They didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them." The artist's goal shares the title of Rimbaud's poem, and there it is at the close, "un goût de cendre vole dans l'air." With Annie Corley, Victor Slezak, Jim Haynie, Phyllis Lyons, Debra Monk, and Michelle Benes.
--- Fernando F. Croce |