Head Over Heels: Models, Yuppies and One Bad Film
As much as I'd like to resist common wisdom about the moronization of American pop culture, I'm inclined to agree with it after watching Head over Heels. This otherwise disposable date flick is distinguished by its willingness to humiliate its characters in the most painfully juvenile and disgusting ways. And unlike the juvenile and disgusting humor in There's Something About Mary and American Pie?both of which I enjoyed?the over-the-top setpieces in Head over Heels don't emerge organically from the characterizations. There's nothing onscreen as stupid-clever as Cameron Diaz's jizz mousse or the Philip Roth meets R. Crumb pie-banging scene in you-know-what (the logical extension of Jason Biggs' animalistic horniness). The nastiness in Head over Heels seems to be there mainly because the marketplace demands it?or because the filmmakers think the marketplace demands it. The grossness transforms this outwardly harmless voyeuristic romance?about a straightlaced career gal (Monica Potter) falling for a handsome but mysterious hunk (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) who lives in an adjacent building?into a soul-deadening piece of hackwork that seems to have no idea it could have been good.
Potter's character, Amanda, restores paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She comes home one day and finds her boyfriend in bed screwing the daylights out of another woman ("This isn't what it looks like," he protests; I think I first heard that line in Working Girl 13 years ago) and leaves to look for a new place. She rents a small room?a closet, really?in a lavish loft occupied by four wannabe-supermodels. And she falls hard for Prinze's character, Jim, a shady stud who's tangentially connected to the garment industry and lives in a fabulous apartment with a picture window that turns his every move into beefcake theater. Of course our heroine has doubts about him. Despite Jim's megawatt smile and ease with flirtation, he seems like a pampered yuppie jerk?and sure enough, just like pampered yuppie jerks all over New York, he's always out walking a gigantic, drooling dog. (It's a Great Dane named Hamlet, which might count as a witty touch if the script didn't feel obliged to point out that it's witty.)
Still, our heroine can't resist Jim's little-boy grin and rock-hard abs. The models, Amanda's Greek chorus, cheer on her infatuation and join her at the picture window when she ogles Jim. Alas, their estrogen-intoxicated reveries are cut short one horrible night when Jim pulls the blinds down and appears to murder a woman in silhouette. Amanda resolves to figure out what really happened and transforms herself into a good-natured slapstick cousin of Nancy Drew; she's abetted by the models, who are, in their own narcissistic, thickheaded way, surprisingly resourceful.
It's easy to imagine Pedro Almodovar having a good time with this plot. He's certainly no stranger to whacked-out, sometimes unpleasant humor. But at least in Almodovar's movie's it's all of a piece; the vulgarity is usually witty, and it flows from the characters' obsessions and the filmmaker's worldview. In Head over Heels, the echoes of Almodovar begin with the title and end with the basic situation. Director Mark Waters and writers Ron Burch and David Kidd?assisted by two credited story specialists and heaven knows who else?think outrageousness and humiliation are the same thing. Worse, they think they can take the sting out of ugly humor by visiting it upon characters that haven't been developed beyond the concept stage. Jim's dog doesn't just try to lick Amanda's face or hump her leg; it knocks her over and tries to mount her while she whines in bewilderment and shock. When the models secretly follow Amanda on a clue-spelunking dinner date with Jim and fear they're about to be ID'd, they hide out in a men's room stall, whereupon a couple of workmen seal off the facilities to do a little roto-rooter work and get down to business in the stall next to the models. In what's clearly intended as an American Pie-style slapstick setpiece, the models mistake the workmen's instructions ("Stick it in," "It's too small," etc.) for a homosexual encounter ("Ewww!"), and the director helps the hilarity along with cartoonish "Splorp!" noises. The scene ends with an ominous rumbling from defective plumbing pipes, followed by an Old Faithful geyser that erupts from the toilet on which the models are perched and drenches them in feces.
Are we supposed to think the humiliations are okay because we don't really know any of these people? There's good stuff in here; the likable Potter looks and sounds like Julia Roberts' kid sister, and the models (played by real-life models Shalom Harlow, Ivana Milicevic, Sarah O'Hare and Tomiko Fraser) are genuinely amusing, expertly conveying fine shades of self-involvement, guileless ambition and unshockable sexual confidence. But the script's promising aspects are drowned out (so to speak) by witless nastiness. At times, I felt as though I was watching a mid-90s Fox network sitcom directed by Paul Verhoeven, or a Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedy written by 12-year-old boys.
It's tough to gauge audience reaction from advance screenings because the studio always packs them with friendlies; still, I heard a lot of people guffawing during Head over Heels, and I suspect their reaction wasn't just corporate cheerleading. Audiences genuinely seem to enjoy this sort of thing?perhaps because they've been conditioned to expect it. Prinze's last couple of pictures didn't do that well, but his other disposable teen flick, She's All That, made quite a bit of money; although this one sat on Universal's shelf for several months, it could still become a hit. The last word of the previous sentence rhymes with something.
Don't miss Journey to the Sun, a Turkish drama from writer-director Yesim Ustaoglu that opens Friday at Cinema Village. It's powerfully rooted in the politics and culture of another land, yet it will resonate with anyone that understands racism, police brutality and the fleeting pleasures and miseries of working-class life. It's about a young man named Mehmet (Newroz Sahin) who works as a repairman for the water company. He's a native of Western Turkey, which means he ought to have many of the same racial privileges that working class white people have in America. The catch: he's dark-skinned enough to pass for a Kurd, and the Kurds, as you're probably well aware, are a despised class in many Middle Eastern and European nations.
To Mehmet's surprise, he befriends a Kurd named Berzan (Nazmi Qirix), with whom he crosses paths during a riot that follows a soccer match. Berzan, who works for a bus company, is a member of a Kurdish rebel underground group; he opens Mehmet's eyes to Kurdish reality, but he doesn't try to draw him into the cause because he likes Mehmet and doesn't want him to get hurt. Mehmet lets Berzan expand his consciousness just a bit, but he doesn't let sympathy mutate into action; like any good citizen in any nation, he thinks other's people's problems don't really affect him. (The friendship between the two is beautifully developed; they have the kind of relationship where they can communicate in barely complete sentences and understand each other perfectly.)
Then, in a twist that rips Hitchcock from the headlines, Mehmet just happens to be on a bus that's stopped by the authorities for a routine antiterrorist search. Unfortunately for Mehmet, a Kurd who was on the bus moments earlier fled when he saw the police light, leaving a pistol that the cops mistakenly believe is Mehmet's. And so Mehmet, an ambitious and sensitive young man who dreams of career advancement and marriage to his German-born girlfriend, becomes a prisoner of the state. Hoping to link him to Kurdish terrorists, they interrogate him with a ruthless illogic that's all the more appalling because it's so matter-of-fact. The sequences immediately following Mehmet's release from jail are chillingly disturbing because they're not hyped-up. Though his face is bruised and bloody, he insists on going back to work. He can't sleep, but he doesn't like to talk about the fact that he can't sleep. When he looks in the mirror, he doesn't say a word, but you know what he's thinking This man looks familiar, but I don't know who he is.
I won't describe any more of the plot, not because there are twists and turns?this is a psychological drama, not a thriller?but because the film works in subtle ways that are better seen than read about. Journey to the Sun has won a string of awards at international film festivals, but it's not one of those award-winning films where the filmmaking takes a backseat to the message. Ustaoglu has a keen sense of where to put the camera, when to cut away from a funny or painful moment, when to use music and when to let the actors act against silence. It's shot in a quasi-Neorealist style, with a mix of experienced actors and talented civilians performing scenes in real locations. Jacek Petrycki's camera work is mostly handheld and uses a lot of available light; the closeups are intensely beautiful without being pretty, and the night photography is some of the best and least fussy I've seen recently. The only movie-movie touch is Vlatko Stefanovski's score, which spikes Turkish harmonies and rhythms with American blues chords. The juxtaposition works. Like a blues song, Journey to the Sun is a tale of woe made beautiful by understanding.