Warm Summer Rain (1989)
My God - it's Last Tango in Barstow.
Warm Summer Rain is one of the strangest films ever
made in America with mainstream actors. Although it features
Hollywood performers, there is plenty of graphic sex and some
frontal nudity, and an ambitious aspiration to strip aside the superficial and
petty ways in which we normally communicate and thence to dig deep
inside the human psyche to find out what we
really want from life. It seems like one of those arty meditations on the
nature of life from one of the great Italian directors. If Antonioni
had come to America to make a movie in 1989 instead of 1970, he
would have made something like this instead of Zabriskie Point. If
Bertolucci had decided to do his "isolated lovemaking as an outlet
for despair" movie in an adobe house instead of in a Paris apartment, he
might have made something like this instead of Last Tango.
Perhaps I have taken too lofty a tone. While it is
entirely appropriate to compare Warm Summer Rain to Antonioni and
Bertolucci in terms of themes and attitudes, I don't mean to equate
this production with the work of those masters. It is more
accurately pictured as an uneasy hybrid between the artistic
aspirations of Italian arthouse cinema and the steamy execution of
80s-style softcore erotica.
In the opening scene, a woman tries to commit
suicide. The next few minutes show the thoughts
that go through her head as she is being rushed to medical care, and
the following montage shows her obvious repulsion at the annoying
people who come to commiserate at her bedside. One day she just
decides to skip out of the hospital. Wearing nothing but her
hospital gown, flip-flips, and an overcoat, she walks out of the
hospital and into the nearest bus station where she points to a
direction and asks for a ticket to someplace over there. Before
arriving at wherever she was headed, she persuades the bus driver to
drop her off in the middle of the desert, where she wanders around
for a while in her sandals and hospital gown, her wrists still
bandaged from her suicide attempt. Her peregrinations eventually
take her to a dusty run-down roadhouse where she proceeds to get
falling down drunk and starts stumbling around in an improvised
dance with a five-legged iguana.
Cut to the next morning, when she wakes up in an
abandoned house, lying beside a man, wearing his wedding ring. This
is where the film begins in earnest. In the next hour, the man and
woman exist in a two person world in which they rip away at one
another's superficial defenses and establish some kind of deep,
sexual communication while trapped in a single isolated location. In
these encounters, Lynch uses the raw sexual and emotional contact as
therapy for her grief. Here you can see the close parallel to Last
Tango in Paris, in which Brando was isolated with a single woman
within an apartment, using sexual contact as therapy for his own
grief. The Last Tango parallel can be extended still further, to a
scene where the man bathes Lynch tenderly, to another scene where
the lovers try unsuccessfully to have a normal sort of day in the
outside world.
I wouldn't recommend watching this with the kids.
It was rated R in the 80s, but those were the 80s. It would be NC-17
today. There is some pretty wild sex and a vast amount of nudity, with both
male and female genitalia making occasional appearances. Some of the
nudity is combined with raw dialogue. It plays out the way Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf might have gone if George and Martha were
young strangers who were sexually hungry for one another. Here's a
"for instance" - at one point the couple is locked in a 69 position,
staring at each other's genitals, and they improvise a competition
in which each must describe the other's genitals with one word or
short phrase, taking turns until one of them cannot think of a new
term, or until one of them uses a term which is successfully
challenged by the other. "Cock. Pussy. Dick. Cunt. Peter. Beaver."
And so forth.
Unlike the other movies I have compared it to,
Warm Summer Rain has a fairly hopeful, almost corny ending, at least
for one of the characters. After all is said and done, the film is not
going for arthouse despair. It marches to the beat of its own
drummer, choosing to be neither an arty work of existentialism nor a
conventional piece of erotica. Sometimes it functions fairly well as
one or the other, but there are other times when it seems to fail
at both. It is not an especially good movie (rated below 5
at IMDb), but I admired its personal, quirky attitude. Even when it fails, it does so in daring, offbeat ways
that can make one nostalgic for a time when filmmaking was not as
safe and formulaic as it seems to be in 2005.
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Nudity
Kelly Lynch (1,
2,
3)
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