LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND (63)

Directed by: Richard Kwietniowski

Starring: John Hurt, Jason Priestley, Fiona Loewi, Maury Chaykin

The Pitch: A fogeyish, reclusive English novelist becomes obsessed with a young American teen-movie star.

Theo Sez: Graceful and discreet, right from the actors' names gently wiped away by the Long Island surf during the opening credits ; but also marred, on first viewing, by a rather unpleasant tension - most of it consists of waiting for our hero to embarrass himself and / or have his heart broken. Looking back, of course (without giving too much away), it's clear the film loves him far too much to let that happen, and indeed he's irresistible - played by Hurt to effete perfection - whether innocently asking "What exactly is a sitcom?" or reflected, phantom-like, in the window of an antiquarian bookshop. That may well be the film's most representative moment, blending a melancholy nostalgia - nobody reads anymore - with an underlying tenderness that takes away any elitist flavour ; there are cheap shots, certainly (Hurt's talk of Rimbaud met with a puzzled "Rambo?"), but in general the film's view of capital-C Culture is decidedly ambivalent, associating it with the dank, oppressive interiors of our hero's musty flat and rejecting the absolutism of Art vs. Trash just as it rejects the absolutism of sexual categorisation - where (and why?) does "finding beauty" turn into homosexual yearning? Its achievement lies in evoking the mutual fascination between "high" and "low" culture (or age and youth, or England and America) even when, as our hero exclaims, "Dear God, this is ridiculous!" ; anyone who's ever found themselves transfixed, against their better judgment, by the detritus of pop-culture will identify.