One from the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola / U.S., 1982):

The spotlight becomes a full moon once the curtains part, neon and sand in the opening titles give Las Vegas as just the synthetic oasis the modernist fable calls for. Fourth of July doubles as the couple's anniversary, she (Teri Garr) decorates travel agency displays and he (Frederic Forrest) runs a junkyard, the dreamy and the prosaic chafing already. "I think a vacation adventure would be a very good idea for us." A squabble sends them in opposite directions for the night, the exotic objects of desire are a lounge lizard who turns out to be a waiter (Raul Julia) and a circus pixie first seen as a sparkly Lady Liberty (Nastassja Kinski). Frump turns bombshell and schlub turns Lothario, uneasily, not unlike modest supporting players asked to become stars in a spectacle. "Where you goin' in that dress?" "To hell and back!" The culmination of New Hollywood's self-destructive streak of tuneful dissonance (At Long Last Love, New York, New York, Popeye), Francis Ford Coppola simultaneously at his most ornate and his most naked. A mise en scène of relentless iridescence, blazing crimson into honeyed yellow into nocturnal blue into morning-after green, vast planes of artifice plugged into the characters' transforming moods. (Scrims superimpose the wandering lovers still in each other's minds, cinema separates and reunites.) Candied imagery for a doleful soundtrack, crooning commentary by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle: "How's it feel... You're a little man... In a great, big town." Vigo's L'Atalante multiplied by Visconti's White Nights, Coppola's coruscating laboratory experiment on human vulnerability and engulfing technology. (Massiveness and evanescence are twin features, Kinski's Teutonic Tinkerbell grows voraciously billboard-sized before evaporating "like spit on a griddle.") Tuneless reality intrudes in the grand romantic gesture at the airport, the tenuous hope of reconciliation simply means light coming to a darkened house. Carax (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) is chief among the disciples. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. With Harry Dean Stanton, Lainie Kazan, and Allen Garfield.

--- Fernando F. Croce

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