Tempestade

There are some nice elements here. Molly Ringwald (at 14, her first film), Susan Sarandon and Gena Rowlands all charm. The Greek scenery is nice but not particularly well exploited. Raul Julia and Sarandon steal every scene they are in, master actors.

But the writing is dreary, wandering all over the place. I'm very patient with meditative movies, but this just meanders. The Tempest connection is so very slight. All the elements, the main magic, that gives the play its power are ignored here and what we have instead is a tired midlife crisis plot, plus a petulant pubescence.

If you want a magical Greek coming of age tale built around a fragile love affair, read `The Magus.'

If you want an intelligent, magical adaptation of The Tempest that has intellectual and visual power, see `Prospero's Books.' Pass this one up unless you just want to experience these women in some comfortable performances.

"Tempest," derived very loosely from Shakespeare's play, is an interesting concept fatally marred by its length. If a ruthless film editor had been employed to cut the final print, this might have been a really good film. It certainly has the right cast: John Cassavetes, Gena Rowland, Susan Sarandon, Molly Ringwald and Raul Julia. Cassavetes, an excellent actor who largely avoided the mainstream, is the "Prospero" of this film, a "world-famous" architect with magical powers, while Raul Julia is Caliban, recreated as Kalibanous, the lone inhabitant of a Greek Island to which the architect retreats along with his daughter (Molly Ringwald) and his young lover (Susan Sarandon), leaving behind his estranged wife (Gena Rowlands). Each of the five performs extremely well, but there are a host of peripheral characters who should have been left on the cutting room floor and many inessential scenes that should have been dispensed with altogether. Unfortunately, Paul Mazursky, the producer, director and co-author of the script indulged himself and was apparently unable to separate the necessary from the surplus. Still, there are the pleasures of this film: the young Susan Sarandon at her sexiest, Molly Ringwald, not yet famous, Raul Julia, an antic, horny Caliban, and Gena Rowlands and Cassavetes at the peak of their talents. Without those pleasures, I would have given this film a much lower rating.

"Tempest" is a somewhat self-indulgent, uneven, discursive movie. But as Lord Byron, another visitor to Greece, protested to his friend John Murray about his similarly self-indulgent and discursive "Don Juan," "It may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing?"

The connections to Shakespeare's "Tempest" may seem, as another commentator here claims, a bit tenuous. But watch the film again after re-reading "The Tempest," and they'll seem far closer. What makes this film flawed is its uneasy mixture of straightforward normal narrative and sudden jarring apparent improvisation, particularly between Cassavetes and Rowland. But to be honest, these scenes are the most remarkable and gripping in the film, if the hardest to watch.

The music of this film, composed by Stomu Yamashta, is also overlooked. Particularly fine is the perfect little piece played to accompany the afternoon siesta, as people, animals, and seemingly the entire island collapse to sleep away the hottest part of the afternoon. It's a sublime moment, and representative of the best aspect of this movie and the one thing that keeps it somewhat unified, the fact that (aside from extensive flashbacks and the very end) it is the story of one day on an island, from awakening to night.

Overall, I'd rather watch this film a hundred times than see some bombastic Hollywood piece of crap once. And in fact, I probably have watched it several dozen times. Most times, I see something I missed before.

(Confession: I'm biased. This was the second movie I took my Greek-American goddess wife to see.)

Trivia notes on this flick:

• It was Molly Ringwald's first movie, as well as Sam Robards';

• It was actually not filmed on an island, but in Gytheion, the southern tip of the remote Mani peninsula of the Peloponnesus of Greece;

• The (by today's standards) primitive special effects were done by Bran Ferren, who later became head of Disney Imagineering, and still later was an adviser to the US intelligence community;

• Paul Mazursky, the director, chose the title of his recent autobiography, "Show Me the Magic," from the script of "Tempest."

I can't say what knowing the source for this movie adds, but this is one of my favorite films from Paul Mazursky (director and co-author). This is a retake on the Shakespeare "comedy", but utterly removed from the stage. Without much text, Mazursky and star Cassavettes make visual a mid-life crisis of passion and purpose. Desperate to re-center himself, Cassavettes retreats to a remote Greek island--where the locals and the island itself weave a little magic. With Raul Julia especially, Susan Sarandon and Molly Ringwald, this is an adult fantasy that is emotionally satisfying and visually gorgeous. And funny. It wasn't a big box office hit, but whenever it does come to DVD, it will sell.

William Shakespeare probably didn't envision Stephanos as a gay doctor, Antonio as a faithless wife, or Caliban as a goatherd with a Trinitron, but the Bard's had worse done to his good work over time, and might even enjoy the sumptuous pageant of life that is his "Tempest" as re-configured by Paul Mazursky and co-writer Leon Capetanos.

This time, Prospero is Philip Dimitrius (John Cassevetes), a Manhattan-based architect tired of designing Atlantic City casinos for the amiable Mafioso Alonso (Vittorio Gassman), especially after discovering Alonso is carrying on an affair with Philip's wife Antonia (Gena Rowlands). Along with daughter Miranda (Molly Ringwald), Philip escapes to a remote Greek island with Miranda and his new mistress Aretha (Susan Sarandon), a nice Catholic girl who struggles with Philip's celibate lifestyle. Will a sudden storm bring all right in the end?

Here's a thought on the career of Cassevetes: How many other actors could make a film so confused into something so riveting? A darling of film critics for his earlier work, often with his real-life wife Rowlands, he presents a central character who really suffers for his art here, but seems to enjoy himself and makes us enjoy him, too. It's not Prospero, but something rich and strange that makes for a terrific sea change all his own.

"It's all here," he tells one of his faithful companions, Aretha's dog Nino. "Beauty, magic, inspiration, and serenity." That it is. "Tempest" transfers 1611 London to 1982 Manhattan and finds some nice resonances in Philip's displaced life. "Show me the magic", he calls out to a storm-tossed city skyscape, and Mazursky's version, augmented by Donald McAlpine's sterling cinematography of purple seascapes and naturally sun-burnished Greek landscapes, does just that.

It's not a perfect movie, by any means. In fact, the big finale, which is the only part of the movie that follows Shakespeare's storyline to any faithful extent, is a mess. Rowland's character is hard to care much for in this film, and after meeting Sarandon in all her braless glory, it's hard to understand Philip's continuing concern for his wife, let alone his left-field desire to make an unhappy "sacrifice" in order to restore the natural order of things.

But there's a lot to love about "Tempest". In addition to Cassavetes, there's Ringwald's film debut as his loyal but restless daughter, here as in the play an object of desire for the primitive rustic "Kalibanos" (Raul Julia). Ringwald here is very much the same teenaged muse of privileged adolescence that would inspire John Hughes, but with an emotional depth those later Hughes films didn't delve into. Ringwald and Julia never got any Oscar attention, but they both would win Golden Globes for their playful work here. He tries to woo her in her island isolation with his TV reruns of "Gunsmoke" in Greek, tempted by her 15-year-old body.

"I want to balonga you with my bonny johnny," Kalibanos declares, getting shoved aside but winning our sympathy anyway, especially after performing "New York, New York" with a chorus of goats. (When "Tempest" hit the screens, Julia was the toast of Broadway as the lead in "Nine".)

It's Mazursky's show, even if it feels at times that Cassavetes is running things with improvisational line readings and emotional breakdowns galore. (Philip introduces himself to Aretha by telling her "I'm right in the middle of a nervous breakdown".) He plays his character as an amiable obsessive, seeking to crystallize his happiness by building an theater in his otherwise uninhabited island.

Adding to the enjoyment is Gassman's rich performance as the other man, who is as completely amiable as Julia while telling a youth-obsessed Philip: "Boys don't have half as much fun as we have. They're nervous...and they make love in the back of an old sports car." Despite being overlong and pretentious in spots, like so many art films, "Tempest" is entertaining in its excesses and a trip very much like Shakespeare intended, even if his dreams didn't involve smoking pot backstage at a Go-Gos concert.