The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 29-July 5
Doomed Love (1983)
Directed by Andrew Horn
Doomed Love is a melodrama. Andre (Bill Rice) loves his wife, she dies, he tries to commit suicide, fails, goes to a shrink, falls for Lois the nurse, she falls for him, but Lois is happily married to Bob. What unfolds is stultifyingly theatrical: the four main characters trade dialogue as if totally stoned at an open mic poetry night hosted by a soft-spoken priest. Speaking and postured like robots, these anti-histrionic personas burp out reductive dry minimal lyricism, usually in clusters of three words—”Life goes on”, ”Don’t look back”—echoing cliché notions of social and personal relationships, philosophy, and emotion. The viewer becomes completely entranced by the banal monotony. But it’s not that easy nor mundane. Halfway through, a voice rings out: “Not to pay attention, is not to be immune.” Perhaps this is a cue, as dialogue, still repetitious and seemingly flat, becomes more and more abstract, blending and overlapping into a noisy verbose soup. Everyday normal, that is, being human, is actually really revealed in utter discordance. Wait for the end, a shocking shift of abstraction taking the viewer into a proclamation of ecstasy, a fable of sorts, or simply the most bizarre exclamation of, perhaps, any film.
Duly note that Doomed Love takes place entirely on illustrated sets, co-painted by art world all-star Amy Sillman, only four years out of undergrad. Literally everything but the actors is fabricated, and at the same time, lovingly handmade, reflecting the artificial façade of dialogue yet the reality of the conversation. Samuel T. Adams (July 3, 7pm; July 14, 21, 10pm; July 24, 5pm at the Spectacle)
