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Iris in and reverse track, not the sparkling Riviera but a rough patch of Venice Beach, beige shacks and oil rigs and telephone poles. The City of Angels is no Bay of Angels, nevertheless the reverie persists: "You were talking in your sleep. You said love." The protagonist (Gary Lockwood) is a young architect tired of building gas pipes, a note from Sunset Blvd. finds repo men ready to tow away his green roadster. ("What a pair of Draculas," snaps Alexandra Hay as the blonde squeeze with Hollywood star fantasies and soap commercials reality.) Los Angeles, not as big a city as it pretends to be, as Welles notes of New York in The Lady from Shanghai, a view from the hills has the smoggy metropolis scored to the whoosh of an off-screen jet. "I was really moved by the geometry of the place," even more beguiling to the soulful deadbeat is the worn belle in the pearly convertible (Anouk Aimée). The titular "tart factory" accommodates their meeting, a fake bedroom in a seedy Santa Monica Blvd. studio for dolls and voyeurs. "Love's a good cause." Crossed paths and missed connections, dreams in empty spaces, the most pensive of Jacques Demy's fancies. The counterculture's poignant uncertainty, peering at a Belmondo poster while learning about being drafted into the Vietnam War. An ugly city of materialistic drabness or a beautiful city of shimmering chance, where the wondrous sense of floating in cars and listening to the radio is enhanced by the occasional hippie hitchhiker who rolls a chummy joint. "Serenity, fullness," an accidental couple's privileged interlude cracking the jaded mask to reveal traces of the girlish ebullience of the showgirl from the director's first film. Purified lyricism, then the inescapable cut to black. "Yeah, always try." A triste wonder, promptly resumed by Stevens (The Only Game in Town) and extensively mined by Tarantino (Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood). With Carole Cole, Tom Holland, Duke Hobbie, Jacqueline Mille, and Severn Darden.
--- Fernando F. Croce |