Bisset shines in sleepy ‘Gal’

“There just aren’t any good roles for women.” Now there’s
a complaint you don’t hear too much anymore. It may no longer be an issue when
actresses like Sissy Spacek, Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger — all of whom
did amazing work last year — still go home empty-handed at the Oscars, while
Denzel Washington wins simply for being cast against type.

            In 2002,
the three best performances have come from women (Jodie Foster in Panic Room, Andie MacDowell in Harrison’s Flowers, and Diane Lane in Unfaithful). A fourth, Jacqueline
Bisset, makes a pretty serious case for joining their company in The
Sleepy Time Gal, which screens this Saturday evening at the Dryden
Theatre. Gal was a festival favorite
that couldn’t find a distributor and debuted on the Sundance Channel about four
months ago.

            It’s too
bad the rest of Gal doesn’t ascend to
the level of Bisset’s performance, though. She plays Frances, a free-spirited,
middle-aged woman we meet while she visits Revolutionary War sites in New York
City with her son, photographer Morgan (In
the Bedroom‘s Nick Stahl). Before long, she’s holding her stomach and
complaining of a bloated feeling, which we eventually learn is terminal cancer.

            In the
meantime, Gal‘s second story thread
involves a New York City-based corporate lawyer named Rebecca (Martha Plimpton)
who is sent to Daytona Beach to supervise the takeover of a radio station.
Knowing her relationship with her current boyfriend (Mulholland Drive‘s Justin Theroux) is kaput, Rebecca strikes up a
friendship with Jimmy Dupree (Frankie R. Faison), the owner of the station.

            The two
stories don’t seem like they have a thing to do with one another, but it turns
out Rebecca is really the daughter Frances gave up for adoption many, many
years ago. Because she’s on her way out and trying to put her life in order as
she looks back at her past with teary, nostalgic eyes, Frances yearns to
contact her long-lost daughter.

            Rebecca,
too, feels the emotional pull of finding her birth mother and doesn’t realize
how close she is, as Frances used to host a late-night jazz show at the Florida
radio station she’s about to capture.

            Unexpectedly,
the two threads never cross. But they do share some nice similarities: both
Rebecca and Frances give thought-provoking soliloquies on life while
precariously perched high above the ground. In addition to hopping back and
forth between at least a half-dozen locations and even more time settings, Gal features stilted, overintellectual
dialogue and a pace as drowsy as its title, barely rising above the type of
film you’d see on the Lifetime Network.

            The good
news, in addition to Bisset’s performance, is that writer-director Christopher
Münch doesn’t reach for the obvious buttons that a weepy mainstream cancer
film, like Stepmom or Life As a House, would push in an
all-out attempt to make everyone in the audience cry their eyes out. (Münch
himself will appear at the Dryden Theatre to discuss the film after Saturday’s
screening.)

            It’s
also very nicely photographed by Rob Sweeney, the Sundance-winning
cinematographer of Münch’s Color of a
Brisk and Leaping Day. Gal is at
least partially autobiographical, which might explain why it’s set in the early
and mid-’80s instead of present day.

            Still,
it’s hard to watch Gal and not think
how much it reminds us of something Ingmar Bergman would make. Coincidentally,
Bergman’s Oscar-winning Cries and
Whispers, which is about a woman dying of cancer, is playing this month, on
the same cable channel on which Gal made its recent debut.

            With my
rudimentary understanding of French, The Lady and the Duke  — or L’Anglaise
et le Duc — translates into the much funnier-sounding The Angel and the Duck. Sadly, there
isn’t one angel or a single duck to be found in the latest offering from Eric
Rohmer, the 82-year-old French new-wave director best known (lately, at least)
for his mind-numbing, four-film series called Tales of the Four Seasons.

            Duke is, instead, a somewhat interesting
look at the effect the French Revolution had on the odd friendship between the
two eponymous characters.

            We see
much more of the Lady than we do of the Duke, but that’s because the film is
based on her memoirs (blandly titled Journal
of My Life During the French Revolution). She is Grace Elliott (Lucy
Russell, from Christopher Nolan’s The
Following), a Scottish aristocrat who, previous to the opening bell, has
established herself as a semi-professional mistress. Having moved from the
Prince of Wales to the Duke of Orleans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus, from Jean-Pierre
Jeunet’s Delicatessen and City of Lost Children), Grace is now
single, but remains close friends with the Duke.

            The
sides that two characters take in the Revolution are surprising, considering
their backgrounds. Though she’s technically a Brit, Grace is staunchly
pro-aristocracy and often bursts into tears at the mere thought of her friends
being slaughtered by common peasants. The Duke, meanwhile, considers himself
more a man of the people than privileged royalty. He does little to hide his
contempt for King Louis XVI (his own cousin!), Marie Antoinette and just about
everyone else being chased out of their fancy digs and led to either prison or
the guillotine. The witty political banter between the two are the film’s
highlights, at least when it comes to the generally dry dialogue.

            There
are some clever set pieces that break up the monotony, like the scene in which
Grace decides to hide a nobleman (Léonard Cobiant) she despises from a band of
soldiers that want to pull off his arms and legs. Rohmer directs with a
stationary camera and does very little editing, which only makes Duke seem even longer and more unwieldy
than it actually is.

            In the
film, Night Moves, Gene Hackman’s
character compared watching Rohmer’s work to watching paint dry. Perhaps that
slam gave Rohmer an idea that took 25 years to germinate. Instead of filming Duke in and around a modern Paris that
looks nothing like it did during the days of the Revolution, Rohmer
commissioned artist Jean-Baptiste Marot to paint 37 different backgrounds of
Paris in the 1790s, which were then digitally superimposed behind the film’s
actors, who were shot in front of blue screens.

            Rohmer?
Blue screens? Digital filmmaking? The next thing you know, Steven Soderbergh
will remake a mediocre film packed to the gills with big Hollywood stars.

            The
result is as visually arresting as it is distractingly odd. After an hour or
so, I was so disinterested in the story and so enamored of the visuals, I began
to quietly plead with the screen to shift the action outdoors so I could enjoy
another Rohmer-Marot combo deal of delicious eye candy. Beyond that, there isn’t
much here, unless you’re really into French history.

‘The Sleepy Time Gal,’ 8 p.m. Saturday, July 27 at the
Dryden Theatre, George Eastman House, 900 East Avenue. $5.50; $4.50 members and
students. ‘The Lady and the Duke’ opens Friday at the Little Theatre, 900 East
Avenue. For more of Jon’s movie ramblings, visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy
www.sick-boy.com, or listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.

This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2002.