Indie U. S. filmmaker James Benning's "Him and Me" (backed by West German tv coin) is a tantalizing but way over-length feature about a couple of young midwesterners in New York City. Helmer, interested in asynchronous sound, formal structure and his tendency to fall in love with certain compositions and scenes, should prove trying even for adventurous audiences. Yet pic is definitely worth a look see.
In what is usually referred to as a "minimalist" mode, Benning avoids action scenes, using voice-over narration and phone calls to provide the pic's underlying story. Visually he presents striking still-lifes, with static or panning camera capturing a mood to accompany the dominating soundtrack. Fleeting cryptic shots and a variety of attractive, balanced compositions hold one's interest (though not much is happening on screen) and for those patient enough to sit through the entire opus there is a final phone call at film's end in which the heroine concisely ties together most of the preceding details.
With New York locations doubling for all sorts of places (Benning comically uses many superimposed titles reading "Vietnam" or other sites and dates while showing us N. Y. today), the man and woman recount their growing up experiences in the Midwest. Social, political and sexual anecdotes are interesting, but Benning insists on dragging out certain shots for several minutes, padding the picture while adding little or nothing to its content. Examples include a helicopter-mounted aerial shot over NYC that seems endless; a shot of a radio playing a lengthy excerpt of the Joseph Welch-Roy Cohn-Joseph McCarthy verbal sparring in 1954 hearings; static shot of a rock band rehearsal; and a truck ride to Brooklyn after the hitchhiking heroine has long since been dropped off (and taken the viewer's interest in the shot with her).
Benning's background is in short films and its lack of consistently gripping material indicates that "Him and Me" might have worked better in a short rather than tedious feature-length format.
My review was written in March 1982 after a Greenwich Village screening.
