FRAMED BY W. DART

Rip It Up, Issue 28, 1 November 1979, Page 18

FRAMED BY W. DART

A WEDDING Director: Robert Altman After the basically chamber work, piece of Three Women Robert Altman again returns to the broader canvas which characterised MASH, Nashville and Buffalo Bill. 48 characters, a 3 day time scale in the film, and 8 weeks work on basically the one set This is A Wedding. All of which is executed with such panache and energy that even two viewings makes one realise there is a lot one is missing. One can imagine Altman being dissatisfied with the limitations of the single screen and if anyone was to try and develop the Warhol lChelsea Girls approach in commercial cinema his would be the first name to spring to mind.

As the title indicates the film concerns a wedding: Southern nouveau-riche bride marries groom from established Mid-western aristocracy, a Catholic ceremony followed by a reception and party at the estate of the groom. After a fairly broad satire of the wedding itself (although it is restrained beside the finale of Michael Ritchie's Semi-Tough), the reception gets to a good start when the grandmother (Lillian Gish) expires upstairs just as the wedding cortage is coming up the drive. From then on it is a series scenes which strip away the defences of and secrets of the various characters: the groom’s mother (Nina Van Pallandt) is a drug addict, his father (Vittorio Gassman) is rumoured to have Mafia connections, his great aunt is a card-carrying socialist, his best man (Craig Richard Nelson) is gay and the groom himself is responsible for getting his new sister-in-law (Mia Farrow) pregnant ... And so the plot or rather the situation develops, involving the characters in various interrelationships. Even the non-family characters have their moments: the caterer (Viveca Lindfors) gets quite blotto after alcohol and pills and seems hellbent on causing embarrassment wherever she goes and her counterpart, the official wedding organiser (Geraldine Chaplin) is revealed to be fighting a penchant for young ladies.

Crown this off with surprise ending an audacious touch that only Altman could really bring off and you have a slight idea of what The Wedding is made of. It is really a little like a Bosch canvas come to life with the characters transposed to a new time and social setting. And it is probably one of the best films to make it to New Zealand this year. THE NEVER-DEAD Director: Don Coscarelli A lovely little piece of junko-horror, a real assembly-line piece with moments of such delirious silliness one just sits back and gasps. Am I the only one who finds timewarp hippies worth a giggle? Some chuckles seem intentional such as the storing of one of the neverdead’s bodies in the back of an ice-cream truck, whilst some seem less so. Still there were some genuine nasty gulps and frights,

one of which involved an airborne minisatellite, so it must rate some degree of success. Don’t expect a Halloween but you might score a minor coronary out of it if you’re lucky. SONS FOR THE RETURN HOME Director: Paul Maunder A disappointing adaptation of Albert Wendt’s novel about the tensions of living in a mixed culture. Somehow between novel and film, the message has become rather naively critical of the shortcomings of our European society, underplaying a lot of Wendt’s fairly hard-hitting criticism of the Samoan attitudes. Still, considering New Zealand films don’t appear every week, it is worth a look. Alun BoHinger’s camera work is eloquently conceived and Uelese Petaia and Moira Walker give first rate performances. THE WORLD IS FULL OF MARRIED MEN Director: Robert Young This farrago derives from a novel by Jackie Collins who was also responsible for The Stud. Need one say more. Probably not apart from a moan that Georgina Hale v7ho was so marvellous in Ken Russell's The Boyfriend (remember her wth Max Adrian in “It’s Never Too Late to Fall in Love") and Mahler is now turning up in bit parts as the wisecracking-friend-of-the-leading-lady (in this case the übiquitous Carroll Baker).