STRAPLESS
Early in his stage career, I’m told, Hare was a firebrand, a proletarian dramatist zinging poisoned darts at the upper classes. But his films–including his screenplay for Plenty, which was at least elegantly directed by Fred Schepisi–are posh, posturingly politicized updatings of what used to be called “women’s pictures.” His female protagonists (the men are largely stick figures) are blocked women forced by will or circumstance to attempt to liberate themselves. Meryl Streep’s embittered idealist Susan Traherne in Plenty–nothing less than a symbol of postwar Britain’s moral decline–fails; Vanessa Redgrave’s repressed schoolteacher Jean Travers in Wetherby begins to get an inkling of what’s wrong with her life (and the culture that spawned her) after a young man blows his brains out in her tidy Yorkshire cottage.
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Hare’s ideas–and I use that word with tremendous generosity–are never fleshed out by his heroines. These unfinished women are merely talking theses; Hare spreads his themes on them as though he were buttering scones. Strapless’s Lillian Hempel (Blair Brown) is a dismal example of the filmmaker’s gauche notions of characterization. We first meet Lillian, a middle-aged American doctor working in a London National Health hospital, on holiday in Portugal. She muses to an admiring stranger, Raymond Forbes (Bruno Ganz), that she’s never understood how Christ’s sacrifice could redeem humanity’s sins. “Such a weird idea.” (Raymond, eager to get into her knickers, nods in agreement –“It is obscure.”) Just as Chekhov knew that a gun planted in the first act of a banal, well-made play will inevitably go off in act three, you can bet your billfold that by the fade-out Lillian will prove herself capable of some Great Redemptive Sacrifice.
The performers can’t do much to deepen Hare’s shallow writing and direction. Blair Brown struggles to make Lillian something more than a casebook study, but little about her rings true–starting with why she left America at 25 for an unremunerative position with the National Health. Brown’s appearance alters drastically from scene to scene; sometimes she looks girlish, sometimes haggard. (Perhaps her highly publicized romance with Hare led to some sleepless nights.) As Raymond Forbes, an enigmatic, romantic entrepreneur–the character’s surname is no accident–Ganz seems totally disengaged from the few scenes in which he appears. Fonda, who brought some sluttish vivaciousness to her previous screen roles, is disappointingly bleached out, her high spirits stifled by Amy’s monotonous petulance. Alan Howard, the lover in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, has a few telling moments as Lillian’s overcautious but sympathetic supervisor.
