The film until this point has been absorbing and sensible, but then it begins to go wrong. The emotional center is sound; we believe the growing attraction the two women felt for each other, but the details of their stories seem contrived and awkward.
Petra, for example, is a little too good to be true; she is a member of a circus troupe modeled on Cirque de Soleil, and her act (not terribly difficult although she isn’t very good at it) consists of juggling balls of light in pantomime from behind a backlit screen. She lives in a trailer decorated like an ecological hippie gift shop. First seen in skin-tight leather (not strictly necessary since she is seen only as a shadow), she appears in a series of bizarre “artistic” costumes that hammer home the point: She is a wild free spirit, offering Camille the choice of remaining in the drab Calvinist environment, or running away and joining the circus. Does the symbolism feel just slightly strained when Camille seeks out Petra a second time, and Petra takes her on a surprise hang-gliding date?
Camille’s relationship with Martin is strained and unconvincing (despite their sex scene together, they don’t seem to know each other very well). And her scenes with Reverend DeBoer (David Fox), the president of the college, are stiffly contrived. When she and Martin are offered the job of college cochaplains, but only if they marry, she wears one of Petra’s wildly inappropriate blouses to the first interview and stumbles through a later interview designed to test her soundness on the question of homosexuality. When the reverend unexpectedly visits her apartment while Petra is there, Camille behaves so strangely that she seems to be concealing not lesbianism, but a panic attack.
The mechanics of the story are awkward. Martin discovers the affair through a convenient photograph, and by peering through a window of Petra’s trailer. Petra sets an artificial deadline because the circus is leaving town. The women have ludicrous misunderstandings. Oh, and there’s Bob, Camille’s beloved dog, “who I realize I love more than anyone I’m supposed to love.” Bob spends most of the movie dead in the refrigerator, and then Camille goes out into the wilderness on a dark and snowy night to bury him, meanwhile nipping at cherry brandy until she passes out and seems to freeze to death. . . .
The ending of the movie completely derails. Leave out such details as that Petra is able to arrive at the side of the frozen body well before the ambulance does. Put aside problems of continuity. Forget even Bob’s remarkable reappearance in the end credits. Laughter is the friend of romance but the enemy of sexual passion (which seems funny only to the observer). And When Night Is Falling has too many unintended laughs for its passion to be convincing. We start out nodding solemnly in sympathy with Camille and Petra. We share their angst. We care about their happiness. But then we start to snicker, and all is lost. This movie needed a strict rewrite, preferably by an unsmiling Calvinist. I shouldn’t have left the theater worrying about what was going to happen to Bob.
When the Whales Came
(Directed by Clive Rees; starring Paul Scofield, Helen Mirren; 1989)
When the Whales Came is the gloomy story of how the gloomy inhabitants of the gloomiest island in the world save themselves from a gloomy fate that would have forced them to leave their barren and overcast outpost in the stormy sea, and move to the jolly mainland. Like all such movies, it features a crowd of extras who wear old clothes and materialize out of thin air on command, to portray the island’s poor and weather-beaten inhabitants.
I realize I am not getting into the spirit of this movie. I know that as a responsible viewer, it is my responsibility to describe it as an urgent and important fable about the fate of Earth, and I am supposed to cheer because the islanders save some whales and thus avoid a curse that drove everyone off of a nearby island seventy years ago.
God knows I am in favor of the whales. I think we should all stop buying Japanese products until the Japanese stop their single-minded campaign to murder every last whale they can get their hands on. That should not be too great a sacrifice, since if such a boycott were really enforced, it would probably only last two days. But loving the whales and loving this movie are two different enterprises, and to the degree that When the Whales Came makes the fate of the whales seem like a dreary and boring subject, it is like to harm the cause.
The movie takes place on the eve of World War I, on the forbidding and rain-swept island of Bryher, off the southwest coast of England. Here the stubborn inhabitants eke out lives of poverty and hard labor. Not far away across the waters is the island of Samson, which has been deserted for years. In the opening sequence of the film, we find out what drove the people away from Samson. When a school of whales swam ashore, the inhabitants butchered them, bringing down upon their heads a series of disasters, diseases, and wells that ran dry.
Only one man remembers those events on Samson. He was a boy then, and he and his mother were the last to leave the island. Now he is an old man, deaf and reclusive, and he lives in a rude cottage on the edge of the sea. He is known as the Birdman (Paul Scofield). Two local children (Max Rennie and Helen Pearce) become friends with the Birdman, and learn to share his love of living things.
Meanwhile, life goes on. We meet the boy’s parents (David Threlfall and Helen Mirren), and watch as the father goes off to fight the war and is reported missing. Later in the film, the father miraculously returns from the war, alive after all, and only a grouch would point out that the entire story of his going off to, and coming back from, the war is entirely irrelevant to the rest of the story (unless the villagers, by sparing the whales, somehow saved his life—a conclusion so banal I am reluctant to subscribe to it).
One day a rare narwhale beaches itself on the island. The inhabitants immediately plan to kill it for its rare tusk, which is long and spiraled and looks like a unicorn’s. Three local juvenile delinquents meanwhile burn down the Birdman’s cottage, but he disregards the tragedy, murmuring “Nothing else matters now” as he attempts to save the whale from the mob of extras who have appeared from over the nearest dune. The children help the deaf man to communicate the history of the tragic island of Samson—and the unruly crowd, once it has heard his story, immediately does an emotional about-face and pitches in to save the whale, after which they stand on the beach, waving torches to scare away other suicidal narwhales, after which there is a happy ending and a joyous kiss between the boy’s reunited parents.
I have nothing but admiration for people who want to spare the lives of our fellow inhabitants on spaceship Earth, but I wish they would appear in full-witted movies. Turtle Diary, for example, was a wonderful and complex movie about two people who conspired to steal some giant turtles from the zoo and return them to the ocean. When the Whales Came is a simpleminded movie by filmmakers who have conspired to make a predictable and morose parable and bang us over the head with it until it is dead.
Wild Orchid
(Directed by Zalman King; starring Carre Otis, Mickey Rourke, Jacqueline Bisset; 1990)
We engage in a conspiacy of silence about erotic movies. We discuss their plots, their characters, the truthfulness of their worlds. We never discuss whether or not they arouse us—whether we’re turned on. Critics are the worst offenders, occupying some Olympian peak above the field of battle, pretending that the film in question failed to engage their intelligence when what we want to know is whether it engaged their libido.
Wild Orchid is an erotic film, plain and simple. It cannot be read in any other way. There is no other purpose for its existence. Its story is absurd, and even its locale was chosen primarily for its travelogue value; this movie no more needs to take place in Brazil than in Kansas, which the heroine leaves in the opening scene.