1256 Choose Me

[domino harvey]

TK

[domino harvey]

My write up

Choose Me (Alan Rudolph 1984) Another wonderfully offbeat movie from this decade, with an unpredictable narrative and interesting, original characters interacting in ways that surprise and delight. While I've always heard this recommended in the same breath as Genevieve Bujold's work within it, it seemed to me that this is really Lesley Ann Warren's movie, and she's fantastic juggling sensuality with self-doubt as a former working girl talking herself through the process of love.

[pistolwink]

Excellent movie! Alan Rudolph remains underrated.

Now to clear up the music rights to Remember My Name....

[diamonds]

Fantastic news, this is a major release and a long time coming. I agree that the film belongs to Lesley Ann Warren, and what a performance it is. One for the ages in my book.

Interesting tidbit from this Spanish-language interview with Rudolph:

Antonio Banderas told Alan Rudolph at a film festival that Pedro Almodóvar had his troupe watch Choose Me (1984) all the time, because that was what he was after. The filmmaker hopes there’s some truth to it, because he considers Almodóvar one of the great film artists in history

[domino harvey]

It’s funny that I never put two and two together but the moment I read that, I was like “Yes, exactly. This is an American Almodovar film”

[knives]

Good insight for sure. I’m glad as well it seems Criterion put some effort into this. Hopefully it leads to a Rudolph reawakening.

[beamish14]

Can’t believe they finally got the Teddy Pendergrass music sorted out. With Breakfast of Champions getting a 4K, I’m hoping more Rudolph is on the horizon, especially Equinox

[John Cope]

Tremendously excited to finally get a good version of this (never would have thought it ever would be released in 4K). As knives says, one can only hope it might incite a decades overdue Rudolph resurgence. Now to just get a similarly fine re-release of Afterglow, Investigating Sex and, perhaps especially, the great but long MIA Equinox. Meanwhile, here's my own piece on it from the lists project:

Choose Me is a perfect gem of a film and one ripe for reappraisal and rediscovery. For me, as a die hard Alan Rudolph fan, this one was always the first in a triumvirate of great films he made in the 80's (the other two being Trouble in Mind and The Moderns, further elaborations of his distinctive style). It's romantic comedy but filtered through his lens, his very particular High Style (though that would get much higher still in the years to come). But it's also a relatable, honest and true human drama of often surprisingly bracing depths. This is Rudolph's great and singular contribution. For as much as he spins the aesthetic and style of his mentor Robert Altman (sometimes in very clear ways) he also develops it along his own track, emphasizing or prioritizing some features more than Altman did or would have, getting into a specialized space of exploration and reflection where the truth of reality and artifice merge.

This is a superb introduction to his technique. And in part that's because it acts as an almost perfect distillation of his themes and ideas, interests and compulsions, stylistic or otherwise. They are all here and accounted for, featuring to a prominent extent, overt but still somehow subtle, determining the form and direction of the film. The film traffics in the meaning of both artifice and style as heightened hyper-reality and within its design it manages to include many complicating elements. The Keith Carradine character, for instance, is described or labeled by a therapist, significantly a figure of authority, as a pathological liar and yet we never know him to lie, we never observe that and indeed all of his most overwrought seeming imaginings turn out to be "real". And this of course reflects on film itself, this one or any other, as a stage for or fabric of "lies" and aesthetic form made up of illusory elements, of simulacra. But this crucially is seen by Rudolph as no lie at all really, no lack of reality but rather an extension or enhancement of it, a revelation of a deeper reality, that which art always promises even as it is also a fiction of a sort, reducible only to that designation for those thus inclined to dismiss it.

In Rudolph's world, his presentation of the world, there is great, aching sincerity in artifice, sometimes only capable of being expressed through the illusion of artifice, even while more recognizable realist notions of raw emotion are also present. The forthrightness of the dialogue, often very funny but also just as often bluntly revealing, carries its own form of that sincerity. Meanwhile the inter-relationship between lies and truth continues in such details as the characters' very names as they are not always their "real" names but another construct, another artifice, serving some other purpose. And, in the midst of all this, is the explicit art of paintings and posters which comment on the action, sometimes clearly and sometimes in more nuanced ways.

The details are where Rudolph always shines, He never leaves anything unattended and that's especially clear in his characteristically expressive background players or even just simply extras that stand out and leave an impression. Here he rejects the idea that such figures should not be present as they are only a distraction. He fills out his world with such "distractions" and his consistent employment of such figures not only disregards the supposedly sage advice of extras not drawing attention to themselves but revels in the idea of that attention drawing. This can range from just populating his frames with couples kissing (a very characteristic Rudolph trope) reinforcing the romantic atmosphere, to unique takes on what might otherwise be just generic characters, such as the mechanic at the bus depot who petitions Carradine for help or the girl at the counter who barely tolerates either of them. Beyond that, there are characters such as John Larroquette's barman, quietly in love with Warren's character as she is quietly in love with others (the brief glimpse of confident conquest on his face as he leaves her house one morning is vintage fine detail Rudolph). But this isn't just about giving these actors "business"; rather it's about how their business suggests a world beyond the frame of the one we get in the movie, a larger and more expansive reality.

As many times as I have seen this over the years I still marvel at Rudolph's ability to draw all these disparate wide ranging tones together into an inextricable web, all elements complementing and enhancing the others. How can he have the broad comic farce character moments and the emotionally bare, deeply felt, all too resonantly real ones? I think it's because he tends to them all the same and really does see them as points along the same spectrum of expressivity. As such they radiate as organic, of-a-piece, whole. And they convince too even when I'm sure there are many who would take issue with, if not outright scorn, his structuring around the contrivance of so many coincidental encounters (in L.A.? No way!). But he pulls this off because he isn't trying to convince us they are anything else. It's just more of the same scaffolding of artifice, resonant as believable in its own way for what it gets at and allows us access to as with any contrivance of fiction or art, its own kind of realism.

The performances are great throughout. Carradine and Warren are terrific together (and makes me long for the reunion that could have been in Rudolph's own Ray Meets Helen). Warren is lovelorn and wary, Carradine is a mercurial enough presence to convince us of his catalytic effects upon others (a less grandiose version of Stamp in Teorema perhaps), and Bujold's character becomes more fully human through opening herself to both sincere feeling and artifice (the moment in which she magically appears behind Warren for just a couple of seconds is a glorious indicator of how Rudolph uses style with intuitive sensitivity). The script is a carefully crafted model of its kind and should be studied (I say that a lot but only when I really believe it). And the film has a perfect final shot which, while vacillating in feeling, encompasses an entire emotional range beautifully and with a grace stroke of a touch. Choose Me can best be summarized in an excerpt from one of the essays on poetry which the Carradine character has written: "...an exciting poem, passionate, witty enthralling. And its anxious, touching human drama is once again...a phenomenon of style."

[Lowry_Sam]

Saw this in the theater when it came out & I think I was the only person in the theater. I loved it, recommended it, but it was pulled within a week before anyone I recommended it to could see it (the same thing happened to Bladerunner in the same theater).

[andyli]

Just finished this wonderful film. Other than the connections to Altman and Almodovar mentioned above, isn't there a touch of nouvelle vague in it as well? There's the intertwined relationship between 3-4 people, the abstract set design (esp. the room decorated with film posters), and even a character who speaks English and French for no real reason. That guy feels like straight out of Breathless or Band of Outsiders to me. Maybe at some point Godard was indeed a reference point?

I can't help but compare this with another film I saw not long ago: Coppola's One from the Heart. Choose Me seems everything that film is trying to be stylistically. The Coppola isn't bad per se, but it's got too much more budget and fewer ideas. Maybe Coppola should have tried to make his film after he bankrupted his company.

[beamish14]

Just finished this wonderful film. Other than the connections to Altman and Almodovar mentioned above, isn't there a touch of nouvelle vague in it as well? There's the intertwined relationship between 3-4 people, the abstract set design (esp. the room decorated with film posters), and even a character who speaks English and French for no real reason. That guy feels like straight out of Breathless or Band of Outsiders to me. Maybe at some point Godard was indeed a reference point?

I can't help but compare this with another film I saw not long ago: Coppola's One from the Heart. Choose Me seems everything that film is trying to be stylistically. The Coppola isn't bad per se, but it's got too much more budget and fewer ideas. Maybe Coppola should have tried to make his film after he bankrupted his company.

Rudolph’s The Moderns has characters toggling between English and French as well. Some prints eliminated subtitles for the French dialogue, and when I saw them on the Blu-Ray, I thought it was a revisionist choice, when it fact, that was always Rudolph’s intention

Choose Me began as a music video project for Teddy Pendergrast, so it really does have quite a few parallels with One From the Heart. I think Genevieve Bujold’s sexual ecstasy scene in the radio station is funnier than Meg Ryan’s dinner table orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. Bujold is an absolutely extraordinary actress

[kubelkind]

There's the intertwined relationship between 3-4 people, the abstract set design (esp. the room decorated with film posters), and even a character who speaks English and French for no real reason. That guy feels like straight out of Breathless or Band of Outsiders to me. Maybe at some point Godard was indeed a reference point?

Zack is played by Belgian actor Patrick Bauchau, who would at the time have been best known as Adrien in Rohmer's La Collectionneuse, so, yep, good call. Rudolph has mentioned the influence of Godard and Truffaut on his films also.

Really hope we get this masterpiece from Criterion UK. Is there some damn petition I could sign or something?

[pistolwink]

The nouvelle vague references are spot on, Rudolph is probably the major American filmmaker from this era (aside from Woody Allen) who wears his European art cinema influences most clearly on his sleeve. That said, one thing I appreciate a lot about him is how his best films filter this influence through a consciously American sensibility -- not in the sense of being dumbed down, but in the sense of having idiosyncratic reference point that are distinctly American. I think the best example of this is Remember My Name, which manages to incorporate both the classic Hollywood woman's picture (in its plot structure and character types) and the vaudeville blues (in its amazing Alberta Hunter soundtrack, which is almost wall-to-wall), thereby drawing an original connection between two American forms.