Talking Dirty

Double trouble: Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant try to find true love in Notting Hill.

Novelist Ciji Ware on true love, untidy apartments, and ‘Notting Hill’

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This column is not a review; rather, it’s a freewheeling, tangential discussion of life, alternative ideas, and popular culture. (The following conversation marks a milestone for Templeton: it’s officially his 200th such cinematic téte-â-téte.)

IT WAS FILTHY,” remarks award-winning novelist Ciji Ware, author of A Cottage By the Sea and Island of the Swans, halfway through lunch. “It was disgusting.”

“It was horrible,” agrees Susan, my wife, accepting a refill of iced tea. “Revolting.”

“I was pretty comfortable with it,” I interject.

Both women turn, treating me to a bemused and silent gaze.

Hmmm. I seem to have stumbled into one of those battle-of-the sexes situations. All because of Hugh Grant’s living room. Allow me to explain.

About midway through Notting Hill–the otherwise charming new romantic comedy from the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral–there’s a scene in which a thoroughly smitten, low-wage English bookseller (well played by Grant) escorts a sheltered, world-famous Hollywood movie star (even better played by Julia Roberts) into his spectacularly untidy house. (He’s just spilled orange juice on her in a “meet cute” way, and has offered her a place to clean up.) Sadly, the bookseller’s home–in part because of Spike, his peculiar Welsh “flat-mate”–is an icky, smelly mess.

I thought it had a nice, cozy, lived-in feel to it.

“I suppose it’s a guy thing,” Ware patiently murmurs.

I glance around the restaurant. Unfortunately, Ware’s husband–Tony Cook, managing editor and publisher of Quicken.com–is next door getting a haircut, and is thus unavailable to help defend our gender.

“I was glad, at least, that when Hugh Grant went upstairs to his own room, it was very nice and neat,” Susan points out.

“That’s right,” Ware nods. “And there was that shot of the blackboard in the apartment: ‘Spike! Clean Up!‘”

So it’s Spike’s fault. Good.

At least the film’s romantic lead can avoid the sharp sting of domestic unacceptability. Unfortunately, that still leaves poor Spike–and me, I suppose–to lurk uncleanly among the ranks of the slobs and clutterers.

CIJI WARE, a newly arrived resident of San Francisco, stands among the ranks of a far loftier group, that of best-selling authors with Emmy awards on their mantles.

Formerly a high-profile TV journalist in Los Angeles (thus the Emmy), Ware also co-hosted a popular drive-time radio show in L.A. for over 16 years. After writing a well-regarded book on stepparenting, she turned her efforts to historical fiction, crafting a series of colorful time-traveling adventures that have gone on to become a brand-name staple of supermarket checkout stands. (This is no slight; commercially speaking, the supermarket is where the majority of Americans now find their reading material.).

Ware’s latest effort is Midnight on Julia Street (Fawcett Gold Medal; $6.99), an engagingly romantic, slightly mystical drama, following Corlis McCullough, a burned-out TV reporter in New Orleans, who tackles a long-forgotten mystery after she begins reliving the 150-year-old memories of her own ancestor and namesake, the passionate and secretive Corlis Bell McCullough.

ASIDE FROM the aforementioned housekeeping deficiencies, Ware loved the love story at the heart of Notting Hill.

“There was no cynicism. Just truth,” she observes. “We need films like this these days. I think a love of romantic fiction is hard-wired into our species. It’s part of our drive to perpetuate the species. Stories like Notting Hill are a good sign, because it means our species still stands a chance of continuing.”

So many modern love stories, Ware believes, are laced with cynicism. She cites The Bridges of Madison County and Message in a Bottle. In each case, once true love is discovered, something occurs to force the lovers apart.

Ware feels this is no coincidence.

“I think, as a culture, we are really unsure and doubtful that we can sustain emotional intimacy,” she explains. “And guess what? The only way you really can sustain it is to work at it, to gain the knowledge you need, knowledge about your own self, so you are somebody who is fit to be in a sustainable intimate relationship.

“I think a lot of people in our lives don’t even recognize that as a goal. They never say, ‘Gee, I guess it requires work on myself to become fit company. Maybe I want to start out on a path where I try to become the best I can be, to learn who I am and what my boundaries are.’

“In the movie, Julia Roberts has to come to that point,” she continues. “The famous actress has to learn who she really is, and to admit how empty she is, and to find a way through that.”

“So what about love at first sight?” I ask. “Soul mates. Prince Charming and all that?”

“I don’t believe in instant compatibility,” she replies. “Love is the process, it’s not the person. It’s all about how you work your way to the point where you find, not your ‘other half,’ but–and this really, really is romantic–you find the person who is walking a parallel path.

“In the movie, she’s a movie star and he’s a bookseller, but ultimately, their paths are the same paths. And now they have to go through a similar process, where they define who they are, for themselves, then have to find where they meet and they each have to change a little in order to get there.”

That’s for sure. For one thing, Hugh’s got to get rid of Spike.

“Ultimately, I think Notting Hill might end up helping relationships,” Ware concludes, approvingly. “It would certainly make a great date movie.”

With a laugh, she adds, “It could end up being a very good date.”

From the June 10-16, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Truffaut à Go-go

Life sentence: French New Wave director François Truffaut took the cinematic world by storm in 1959 with his semi-autobiographical debut film, The 400 Blows, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud (above) as the abused adolescent hero.

New biography and local screenings recall career of director François Truffaut

By Michelle Goldberg

A TEMPESTUOUS prodigy who grew up to symbolize the film establishment that he scorned as a young man, François Truffaut changed both the movie industry and the way we all think about cinema. He was so pivotal in shaping his generation’s aesthetic ideas that Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana’s excellent new biography of him reads almost as a history of French film, a critical survey full of the romance, nuance, and bittersweet drama of a good novel.

Additionally, so much of Truffaut (Knopf; $30) resonates with our own culture that it seems to illuminate the dead ends that American movies have reached–surprisingly, the manifestos that Truffaut penned in the ’50s seem equally revelatory today.

The leader of the French New Wave, Truffaut fought for a highly personal, independent cinema, first as an enfant terrible critic and later as a director. (You can see a selection of his films, including The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim, through June 24 at the newly renovated Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.)

Truffaut was still in his 20s when he formulated the auteur theory, the idea that a director is the “author” of his films (an idea that is somewhat taken for granted–even taken to excess–today). It was largely through his tireless championing of Alfred Hitchcock that the master of suspense was recognized as a genius in America, years after he’d been canonized by the gang at Cahiers du Cinéma, the critical organ of the New Wave.

As a writer, Truffaut cleared the way for his films and those of his compatriots–Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and others–by mercilessly attacking the generation preceding him. Reading his jeremiads today, one is struck by how accurately they depict the malaise our own film industry is suffering from.

“The director should have the same humility toward his characters that St. Francis of Assisi had toward God,” wrote Truffaut in “The Time of Contempt: Notes on a Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” the essay that launched his career as a critic.

“For us to accept infamous characters, the person who creates them must be even more infamous,” he wrote. “Anathema, blasphemy, sarcasm are the three passwords of French screenwriters … . These ‘superior’ artists claim to be superior to their creations; this presumption explains, but fails to excuse, the bankruptcy of the arts since the invention of motion pictures.”

At the time, we learn in Truffaut, his attack on the cynicism of the French film industry was seen by some as right wing, and, indeed, Truffaut began his career as a conservative, largely in response to the dogmatically Communist cultural establishment. But the director, who would, in middle age, sell copies of the banned newspaper La Cause du Peuple in the street with Sartre and de Beauvoir, wasn’t a moralizer in his films. He was a humanist, lyrical and empathetic but unsentimental, alert to contradictions and distrustful of all politics.

Truffaut was 28 when he demonstrated his conception of a new cinema with the groundbreaking The 400 Blows, based on Truffaut’s own bitter adolescence as a neglected, somewhat hapless juvenile delinquent. The 400 Blows captures both the conspiratorial joys of childhood and the horrific frustration of being at the mercy of unkind adults. The movie introduced Jean-Pierre Léaud, who was to be Truffaut’s alter ego in several other films, and, after winning the prize for best direction at Cannes, it spurred a national debate on child abuse.

One of the things that makes Truffaut such a fascinating biography is the way the book’s authors, like Truffaut himself in Day for Night, switch effortlessly between the films themselves and the behind-the-scenes dramas. Truffaut’s habit of having affairs with his leading ladies surely helped in this regard–it certainly sheds light on the melancholy passion of Jules and Jim, a film about an impossible ménage à trois in which two best friends live together with Catherine, the woman they both love.

Catherine was played by Jeanne Moreau, who became Truffaut’s lover and muse. Toubiana and de Baecque quote a friend of Truffaut’s who stopped by the set, “It was complicated because everyone was in love with Jeanne Moreau–the producer Raoul Lévy, who came by unexpectedly, Henri Serre, François himself. He was literally fascinated by her. The ambiance was euphoric at times and at times painful, almost tragic,” a perfect description of the ambiance of the film as well.

Jules and Jim was, of course, enormously celebrated. After such a rocket rise to the top of his profession, it was inevitable that Truffaut’s ferociously adversarial stance would mellow. In the biography, this makes him a much more interesting character, because Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana capture the tension between Truffaut’s anarchistic streak and his mainstream ambitions.

The director, they write, considered himself a craftsman, not an artist, and had little use for the avant-garde, which led to a falling-out with his friend and colleague Godard. Godard sent him a scathing letter after seeing Day for Night, ending insolently with the line, “After Day for Night, you ought to help me, so that audiences don’t think that the only kind of movies being made are your kind.”

The split that followed would mark the end of the New Wave, and while Godard wasn’t the only one at the time to decry Truffaut’s increasing conventionality, our authors’ sympathies are clearly with their subject. “Refusing to play the martyr (he left that to Godard), Truffaut pleaded his cause, that of an independent director whose career was punctuated with both success and failure: “‘I take complete responsibility for the films I make, their qualities and faults, and I never blame the system.'”

Indeed, there’s a deep respect for Truffaut that’s implicit in every line of the book and that suggests the authors’ willingness to always give the director the benefit of the doubt. With his compulsive womanizing, his shifting values and uneven oeuvre, there’s much in Truffaut’s life that Toubiana and de Baecque could have used against him. Though the man was eternally unfaithful to women, for example, there’s little evidence here of the pain and bitterness he must surely have caused at least a few of his lovers.

But while the biography surely glosses over a few of the messier aspects of Truffaut’s personal life, the writers’ sympathy ends up being a virtue. Like Truffaut’s greatest films, Truffaut is both authoritative and humble, with a truth and morality born of suspended judgment.

From the June 10-16, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Power Up

Shagadelic, baby: Mike Myers is international super-spy Austin Powers in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

‘Austin Powers’ brings back the low-brow camp

By Nicole McEwan

SOMETIMES movies are less significant as films and more important as cultural signifiers. Three years ago, director Doug Liman turned the burgeoning swing subculture into a national sensation with Swingers. In 1997, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery created a similar stir by launching its outrageous mojo-working hero at a phenomena-hungry public, quickly adding such catch phrases as “groovy, baby” and “shagadelic” to the American lexicon.

In an age in which free love had come to be associated with its possible consequences–free STDs–Austin functioned like a raging collective id, a sexual superhero whose main power was the ability to bed gorgeous women despite his rotting teeth, shaggy chest, and super-sized ego. No doubt it was his unflappable lust for life that turned them (and us) on. The film was a clear admission that, in a culture starved for something new, re-cycled kitsch would just have to tide us over.

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me picks up where the first film left off, smack in the middle of Austin’s honeymoon with the deliciously dishy Vanessa, the woman who turned Austin on to the heretofore unexplored “joys of monogamy.” Alas, Vanessa is no ordinary woman–in truth she’s a fem-bot emissary of Dr. Evil sent to seduce and kill our love-crazed hero.

Before you can say “Groovy, baby,” the honeymoon is over, and just in time, because the nefarious Dr. Evil is on the loose again, more hell-bent than ever on world domination. It’s up to Austin and shapely superagent Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham) to stop him. To make matters worse, the power-hungry fiend has stolen Austin’s mojo, leaving him very, shall we say, un-shagadelic.

Anyone who’s seen the original film or any of the countless James Bond flicks the franchise satirizes can imagine the stock scenarios that follow: basically, a series of car chases and last-minute rescues, mixed in with lots of sexual innuendo, next-wave gadgetry, and scantily clad supermodels. Add a few campy dance sequences and extreme potty humor and you have a pop culture cocktail that references everything from Jerry Springer to the chi-chi coffee craze of the ’90s.

And that brings us to one of the film’s low points. In a supposed effort to spoof the product-placement frenzy that makes some blockbuster films resemble billboard-size virtual catalogs, Spy includes over-the-top usage of logos or products from Starbucks, AOL, and, most pointedly, a garishly painted new VW bug. Memo to director M. Jay Roach: You really can’t have it both ways.

What’s more, though the film’s lead sex kitten, Miss Graham, certainly fills out her halter-tops quite nicely, she lacks the comic timing and innate sauciness that Elizabeth Hurley showcased last time around. Spy’s absurd anti-plot frequently places the two superagents in compromising positions. Sadly, the only thing truly compromised is the hope of any sexual chemistry between the pair.

What’s truly impressive about Spy is the talent of Mike Myers, Canada’s Man of a Thousand Faces. Besides reprising Austin and Dr. Evil with immeasurable gusto, Myers also portrays the villainous Scotsmen Fat Bastard, a metric ton of unadulterated lechery who thrives on mayhem and dreams of snacking on small children. It’s not an overstatement to say that Myers virtually disappears into the role.

With its take-no-prisoners approach to humor and machine-gun barrage of gags, Spy is a hit-or-miss affair. But, building on a marketing campaign designed to sell it as an antidote to The Phantom Menace, the movie will likely rock the multiplexes and produce more sequels. Like George Lucas, another retrofitted nerd, Austin Powers’ force is destined to be with us for a very long time.

From the June 10-16, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.