AFTERGLOW (51)

Directed by: Alan Rudolph 

Starring: Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jonny Lee Miller

The Pitch: Two couples swap partners, unbeknownst in each case to their respective spouses.

Theo Sez: You can't really enjoy a Rudolph film unless you can imagine little quotation marks round everything that's said and done : he deals in a kind of amused irony, a subtle self-aware spin that's always half-hidden, as if seeing the absurdity in situations without quite signalling he sees it. It's probably why he works best with slightly offbeat subjects, teetering on parody (the good-twin-bad- twin dynamics of EQUINOX, or the brittle bon mots of MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE) - it lets him find that second, unspoken layer of playfulness and self-awareness without losing his trademark hands-off style. This, on the other hand, is a fairly straightforward sexual- roundelay-cum-romantic-farce, and it really needs a hands-on style if it's going to work - it needs to be constructed, and Rudolph is a poor constructor : the first half especially, as relationships are spelled out and motivations delineated, is so clodhoppingly obvious it's almost embarrassing (the last 20 minutes on the other hand, as it becomes an almost abstract play of flickering emotions, are magnificent). Unsurprisingly, the actors who try to "build" a character in the traditional way come off worst - Boyle especially is awful, because she never tries to be more than what's on the page in front of her, emphasising in order to characterise (and, the more she emphasises, the worse she gets) ; Christie, on the other hand, working in the spaces between the action - in the languid tapping of a cigarette, or the raised eyebrow just before she brushes off a clumsy suitor - manages to infuse everything she does with mystery, bringing the unknowable to her character, implying that she might be a world-weary woman looking for love or she might be something else entirely. She alone seems to realise the magical thing about Rudolph's great, graceful movies : that they can be anything you want them to be.