This was made by the legendary director Jules Dassin. A master director's intuition can lead the setting in a way that explode off screen, while still being deceptively plain, like a painting itself.
All this context is sort of alien for the 1980s romantic comedy it begins as. I could not resolve the love story at first, it is so off-key, so over-the-top and forced. I was expecting an edgy work from that generation who followed Dassin, especially with the comic set up with her in the porn theater at the start.
The second half totally re-frames the first. The melodrama makes it come alive. Because she is not believable as an 80s girl but a 40s girl in a Dassin noir.
Like those classic noirs the female is "female", an image its dramas stem from archetype. Or to put it simpler, the female is deadly.
The key is that Burton is never fully buying into it, or taking the love story seriously, and that we the audience shouldn't have been either.
The film peels back its own layers in a way you would see in an Ophuls or Fuller film. This meta narrative of the painter reveals the film within the film, that his attraction to her was not romantic, but in recapturing the past he is desperate to regain. In cinema, art and love are both a proxy for life, for redemption, and for the happy end.
We see that with how unpleasant he looks on screen, and his horror seeing the older man's face. While her love for him is her version of the art.
The performances begin to make sense as part of a larger vision.
None of this is for its time, it is rather a mark on that Hayes code era Dassin came in. You see the DNA of that old school way of cinema coming through, those hard-nosed golden era directors seeing through a different set of eyes, the bleakness and futility of the film. It becomes a pleasure. Melodrama is not just histrionics but about distilling the full range of human emotion inside the confines of a story. If you can get through the very awkward first half it becomes a gem.
All this context is sort of alien for the 1980s romantic comedy it begins as. I could not resolve the love story at first, it is so off-key, so over-the-top and forced. I was expecting an edgy work from that generation who followed Dassin, especially with the comic set up with her in the porn theater at the start.
The second half totally re-frames the first. The melodrama makes it come alive. Because she is not believable as an 80s girl but a 40s girl in a Dassin noir.
Like those classic noirs the female is "female", an image its dramas stem from archetype. Or to put it simpler, the female is deadly.
The key is that Burton is never fully buying into it, or taking the love story seriously, and that we the audience shouldn't have been either.
The film peels back its own layers in a way you would see in an Ophuls or Fuller film. This meta narrative of the painter reveals the film within the film, that his attraction to her was not romantic, but in recapturing the past he is desperate to regain. In cinema, art and love are both a proxy for life, for redemption, and for the happy end.
We see that with how unpleasant he looks on screen, and his horror seeing the older man's face. While her love for him is her version of the art.
The performances begin to make sense as part of a larger vision.
None of this is for its time, it is rather a mark on that Hayes code era Dassin came in. You see the DNA of that old school way of cinema coming through, those hard-nosed golden era directors seeing through a different set of eyes, the bleakness and futility of the film. It becomes a pleasure. Melodrama is not just histrionics but about distilling the full range of human emotion inside the confines of a story. If you can get through the very awkward first half it becomes a gem.