Liebestraum

The main problem with Mike Figgis' overly arty 1991 offering is such a diaphonous plot it's a wonder he got the financing in the first place. His 1990 Internal Affairs had been a smash (and also one of the most unpleasant of the Nineties) so he pressed on with this beautifully lit slice of old tosh in which the leading man gets to look moody a lot.

Not so much a movie as a coffee table book screened at 24 frames a second.

On the plus side, Pamela Gidley is gorgeous, there's a creepy scene toward the finale with a wheelchair and nice to see Kim Novak back on the big screen.

Watch it for the great lighting and soundtrack and you may not be disappointed. Might be better to read a book as well as there's little point paying attention to the threadbare plot.

2/5

Kim Novak returned to films in this Mike Figgis film. During the shooting there was a lot of PR generated by the legendary star's return to films including an interview with Kim Novak by the Sunday New York times Movie Section, great advance PR for the film. The back story of this movie would have been a better film than what appears on screen. Ms. Novak fought bitterly with Mike Figgis who threatened to cut Kim Novak's part to shreds, and Figgis did. What resulted is a muddled film that stars Kevin Anderson a fine actor whose part must also have been edited. Ditto Bill Pullman. Liebestraum - a brilliant title- makes little sense as a film.

Liebestraum started out as a Warner Bros film but ended up as a MGM film and that once fabled studio was going thru one of its periodic slumps and financial distresses and gave this film a very very limited opening in only two cities Los Angeles and New York. The New York Times favorably reviewed Ms. Novak in its review which should have given MGM and Figgis to open the picture more widely. The mystery here is not the film's murky subject but the fact that Kim Novak a worldwide star and a very under appreciated actress was given so little to do but moan. Novak is seen basically bed ridden and moaning during the film until a shocking windup.

In a purely business observation, Kim Novak was at one time a huge box office draw with films such as Vertigo, Picnic, Bell Book and Candle, Pal Joey, Strangers When We Meet, The Mirror Crack'd et al and MGM and Figgis should have sold this as a Kim Novak return project and they would have made their money back on that. Instead, Kim Novak was ignored by Figgis who in turn ignored this film refusing to do any PR for the project upon its release and sadly this film ended the film career of Kim Novak.

Madonna was supposed to do the female lead but told her then beau Warren Beatty she did not understand the script. Beatty wisely told Madonna if she did not understand the project do not do it. Pam Gidley stepped in to replace Madonna. Wise move on Madonna's part.

I like films that are dreamlike and fluid, floating that wanders outside of the confines of self and story. At the same time I like them to draw fresh water from the well of mysterious non- self that underpins really anything that is exuberantly receptive to the world (passionate sex, dreaming, youth, all a part of it), wipes anxiety and restores our way of seeing to the far-flung horizons teeming with possibility that youth and early lovers know.

Lynch is a natural master of this deep swimming. Ferrara tried briefly at around the same time. Further back it was Rivette. A lot of film noir works in a similar way for me.

Here we have all these things; dreamlike in the way that Lynch is, about passion that dives in and perturbs reality, and a cinematic mind-bending swim in the waters. It's nominally a thriller, but written in waters, fluid about anxiety and self.

It has the noir engine where someone sets out to investigate and finds himself embroiled in mysterious goings-on. In noir that's usually a PI, but it doesn't have to be. Here it's simply a son whose mother has been hospitalized and he arrives to the small town to care for her.

He an architectural writer, she a photographer, both coming to explore an old building that is set to be demolished, but she has a husband. They unearth a story that took place in that building long ago, about illicit lovers discovered one night. We have some obvious symbolism in the building as obliquely shared past and as wandering through his own mind that is buffeted by anxieties.

And it has the notion of persisting memory where something that happened in the past is rising up again in the present. The noir drive is that the more he succumbs to passion, the more he is pulled as a narrator into a past story about similar passion.

So they fall for each other while he's unearthing a narrative of how that shattered lives one day. By investigating further, he comes to understand that he's tied to that story via his parents; his mother has been unwell ever since. There's also another son whose life is intimately woven to events of that night, an eerie figure like out of Lynch who by driving past the building one day causes someone to die.

It's all eventually made to align during a hospital visit late at night. Another invalid mother is wheeled out, central in events of that story. A metaphysical wiring between bodies takes place, bodies entered it seems by our knowledge of the story. The fateful coupling that upset reality takes place once more inside the building; once more a vengeful spouse is waiting in the shadows with a gun. But they say that they love each other. He's eavesdropping and stays his hand.

This is worthwhile stuff.

Noir Meter: 2/4 / Neo-noir or post noir? Post

I was hooked from the first minute I saw this one! All my friends to whom I recommended this film, liked it too. And they said all the same. Good, you told us to watch this movie very carefully, and keep concentrated on it, constantly, cause it will keep you guessing long after you seen it! Seldom I've seen a film, so slow, but so good! It has such a strange feel about it, it's erotic and it has thriller effects, especially each time somebody enters the building. The leads are good, Pullman exellent! Mike Figgis is a great director, but he never made something good, as this, afterwards. Very nice photography, and good soundtrack.

Peter Piessens.

Some of the comments here on this movie seem to point in the direction that people simply don't seem to be able to grasp the subtle implications of this movie. The movie consists of two intertwined stories, one in the past and one in the present, and until the very end, the story of the present is a direct repetition of the story of the past, only in a different setting. And some of the people from the story of the past are still alive and present in the story of the present.

Most importantly, Bill Pullmans character, Paul Kessler, plays the repetition-role of the angry husband, who one generation ago killed his wife and her lover. Only Paul Kessler doesn't (yet) have an adulterous wife to kill, so his hate and anger is pointed at the building, in which the past act of hatred took place. Paul Kessler is the engine that drives the repetition-pattern in the present of past events, and the two main characters, Nick Kaminsky and Pauls wife Jane, can't help but to play their part in repeating history.

The love- and the hate-stories of the past and the present and their repetitive nature are the drives and motivators of this movie, and everything else evolves and is motivated from this pattern.

The movie really isn't that subtle, it simply can't be explained by mere deductive logic. It's a love- and hate- and crime- and almost a ghoststory and if you absolutely have to have an explanation for everything in this movie, the explanation would have to be found in the explanation of the present through the past and in the illogical event of the almost complete repetition of the past in the present.