Collateral Damage; Investigating Sex
Collateral Damage's out-of-time release is a lesson in political disingenuousness. The title whitewashes the outrage of media-adopted military lingo. Director Andrew Davis manipulates Desert Storm insensitivity into self-pity; when "collateral damage" applies to us, it's no longer a casual thing. Either way it's meant to juice the box office and here it inspires Ahnuld's heroism. Imagine how a politically honest filmmaker might use this occasion. Godard could have Ahnuld play himself, exposing the pitiless use of global crisis as action-movie fodder?revealing post-9/11 Hollywood as Alphaville. Ahnuld's mountains-jungle-waterfalls trek recalls Proof of Life, The Fugitive, while Francesca Neri as Lobo's wife is essentially a Bond villainness?exotic, sexy, cruel. Ahnuld's fireman's expertise at creating a fireball seems routine, and a friend jeered the climactic series of terrorists' explosives as "dial-a-bomb." These cliches aren't patriotic, just arrogant.
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Alan Rudolph has pulled off a most difficult kind of movie?but it may elude absolute comprehension on a single viewing. Investigating Sex is made with trust in film as poetry, an expressive and evocative art form. In spite of the popular taste for instant gratification, Rudolph emphasizes cerebral sensation over a mere "story." In 1929, a group of men and women are invited by ousted professor Edgar (Dermot Mulroney) to meet at a salon near Cambridge, MA, to discuss their opinions on sex. This event is as sensual and lyrical as those in any other film by Rudolph (a casual but true esthete, best known for Choose Me and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle), but its idiosyncrasy (talky yet sexy) becomes less perplexing and more pleasing on repeat viewing. That's no fault; the film's subject and style repay close attention.
Rudolph emulates a moment in the history of the French Avant-Garde when Andre Breton and several surrealist cohorts, including Man Ray, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst and Jacques Prevert, conducted an intimate symposium that became the basis of a book titled Recherches sur la sexualite, 1928-1932. In a jest, Rudolph transposed these meetings to an American academic setting. Avoiding the mistakes of his 1988 film The Moderns, Rudolph's intent is less history-minded than it is immediately concerned with noncelebrities' interest in sex and art?modern preoccupations with highbrow (though obscure) antecedents. Rudolph knows two universal fetishes?sex and movies?and Investigating Sex interweaves them subtly, along with the characters' lusts and confusions. Edgar seeks to understand why his fixation on an ideal woman keeps him from fulfilling relationships with French Chloe (Julie Delpy) or the two American women he hires to transcribe the discussion, the virginal Alice (Neve Campbell) and the experienced Zoe (Robin Tunney). His male friends, British painter Sevy (Alan Cumming), German novelist Monty (Til Schweiger), filmmaker Oscar (Jeremy Davies), a colleague Lorenz (Terrence Howard) and a former student Peter (John Light), confound him by showing there are as many conflicting sexual philosophies as there are men.
In this laboratory environment, each man and woman is a private pioneer. Their expeditions are brought together by Faldo (Nick Nolte), a wealthy adventurer. His mansion is virtually a museum of modern art filled with objets recalling Dali, Duchamp, Claes Oldenburg. Evoking an era of intellectual discovery, this setting contextualizes Rudolph's modern emotional orgy. Male/female dynamics are animated entirely through looks, language and art references. To a film culture that for more than two decades has mostly ignored Rudolph?one of the most inquisitive and funniest filmmakers America has ever produced?Investigating Sex may seem peculiar indeed. So here's a hand up: Rudolph has broken his own fetters and gone beyond the social/romantic whimsy of Choose Me into genuine surrealism?the art movement from which film first delivered a new sense of the erotic.
That's why a single viewing of Investigating Sex may be bewildering; still stuck in the primitive era of sound film, we forget its erotic visual essence. Rudolph threads interrogative dialogue within his typically diaphanous, widescreen imagery. Investigating Sex's theatricality recalls those odd, declamatory movies Inserts and Insignificance, but better than either it indulges the ecstasy of Faces! Actors! Mulroney's dark eyes shift, barely hiding his sexual avidity; Tunney's ginger hair and alert stare challenge anyone she sees; Cumming has delightful mercurial secretiveness and Terrence Howard's sly warmth makes an occasion of his own too-few lines. These performers put viewers back in touch with one of the basic attractions of movies by making sexuality vivid. When Edgar says, "I draw from my subconscious without shame," he's like Rudolph, whose longtime exploration of how private fantasies intersect people's public personas is the achievement of an artist who always dances on the edge of his subconscious. Edgar announces, "I'm searching for the purest kind of love in the opposite sex, the purest kind of sex in love," but his concern with "a resolution of the two states?dream and reality?which are seemingly contradictory" is exactly what the surrealists thought a good filmmaker should accomplish.
Investigating Sex shows Rudolph in a more experimental mode than even his masterworks Equinox and Afterglow or those marvelous flirtations with commercialism Trixie and Mortal Thoughts (the only good Demi Moore movie). The key is in Oscar's experimental surrealist films, both significantly screened "on the backstairs of the library." Oscar's montages of jokes, phantoms and muses parallel how Rudolph fulfills Edgar's thesis, "A man is always looking." As Edgar probes his guests' most intimate relations, discarding all romantic notions, Rudolph finds correlatives for the male obsession with visual stimulation. His own unstatic camera and Oscar's spoofing, disconnected flickers are the kinetic, cinematic facts that still undergird academic discussion about sexuality. Seeing sex as "the last great unexplored human mystery," Rudolph joins the surrealists. When Edgar is told, "How about love itself? If you could take a picture of that you'd be famous," it's Rudolph's joke on his own obscurity and artistic obsession.
In lines like, "When you buy into buggery the bottom falls out," and "Love is my delusion that one man is different from another," Rudolph proves himself the American filmmaker most in love with ideas?whether raunchy or refined. It's a healthy, unpretentious mix, even though Rudolph and coscreenwriter Michael Henry Wilson don't clarify Edgar's poignant loss: he never goes from A to Z with women because he's in love with his own intellection, stymied by the notion of a succubus or a female muse. Rudolph might have clarified this particular male weakness. He mischievously stresses Shavian argument or Albee-like conundrum, yet it's Apollinaire's writing about Alfred Jarry that exactly describes what Rudolph has achieved: "Elation in which lyricism becomes satirical...orgies of intelligence in which sentiment plays no part."
And talk about a muse! Rudolph casts Tuesday Weld as Faldo's mistress Sasha (reuniting the stars of 1978's Who'll Stop the Rain). Still saucy yet sage, ex-sex kitten Weld plays out older-generation sex by spoofing Zsa Zsa Gabor volatility. "Love is Vorfare!" she tells the younger women. Weld's exuberance inflates Rudolph's conceit then brings it to earth. What a treat! The way Sasha and Faldo fight and fall back is itself a model of intimacy.