Doodles

By F.R.

A PERFECT COUPLE

Directed by Robert Altman

Screenplay by Robert Altman and Allan Nicholls

A Perfect Couple Is Robert Altman's 14th film in nine years, his second so far in 1979. He needs to slow down. Although his new movie is easier to take than the last, the ridiculous Quintet, it is still a rushed and tired work. A Perfect Couple does boast a superficial resemblance to Altman's best social comedies, like The Long Goodbye and Nashville, but it has about one-third the energy. The jokes don't fly, the actors don't sparkle, the craftsmanship doesn't dazzle. Altman is merely going through the motions, with results that border on self-parody.

At heart Couple is but a cloying romantic comedy, partially camouflaged by characteristic Altman flourishes. The pair are Alex (Paul Dooley) and Sheila (Marta Heflin), lonely souls who meet via a video dating service. It is not love at first sight. Alex is a middle-aged classical music fan who is still under the thumb of his large, oppressively patriarchal Greek family. Sheila is younger, a rock singer, and lives with ambisexual fellow band members in a loft commune. When Sheila explains to Alex that her loft is located in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, he replies, "All those neighborhoods look alike to me." Such is the tenor of the movie's repartee.

Even as a love story, the film fails. Part of the problem is the stars, who are too bland, and at times charmless, to inspire much audience empathy. A sadder difficulty is the script's uncertainty of tone. Alex's and Sheila's batty home lives are presented in such outrageous broad strokes that the credibility of the couple's supposedly sincere romance is under mined. There are a few funny peripheral moments, especially those that focus on the mores of video dating, but there are also stale gags about wayward cars and coitus interruptus. In this context, Altman's allusions to his better films are particularly depressing. Like Nashville, A Perfect Couple features a climactic death, weird minor characters who traipse mysteriously through the action, as well as a lengthy musical score, sung by Sheila's rock group. There are even moments when Heflin starts to look like Shelley Duvall. But this time Altman's idiosyncratic devices are not organic to his material; he slaps them clumsily onto the film, like aimless graffiti doodled on a billboard.

Rather than adding emotional or satir ical resonance, the songs and eccentric asides only bring confusion to the movie's continuity: Nashville has devolved into nonsense. --F.R.

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