The Second Coming of Suzanne

I didn't even want to watch this movie after reading Maltin's review and 1 1/2 star rating. I watched it anyway on the advice of my son and found it much better than I expected. I would give it 2 1/2 stars out of a 4 star system. You have to watch the movie more than once to understand it all. If you don't know much about religion, you will miss a lot. I graduated from high school the year the movie was made, so maybe I can relate to it better. Yes, there is some pretension in the movie and it's weird to some extent, but that was the 70s so what do you expect. I can see why people might not like the movie; however, I cannot understand people saying it is boring. The movie is anything but boring. You will either hate it or love it. If you find it boring, you are probably brain dead.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. Remembering that the film was first Proposed in 1970 and came into being in 1974, it is not really the hippy trip some suggest. Caught in the haitus between old and new cinema it attempts to explore the story of the passion through an impressionistic approach. The gender reversals are brave but work in the context of burgeoning feminism. Sandra Locke is as mysterious as she is effective, the three Mary's, here played by men are far more than they appear, and the dialogue whilst sparse is weighty. The production owes a lot to the late sixties populist style of say the Beatles films but also points forward to the work of Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway. It is a shame that these early 70s films are judged on their ( deliberate) failure to conform rather than on their contemporary achievements. The much bigger budget filming of Jesus Christ Superstar, or the tangled rhetoric of Zabriski Point, are more accessible but fail to communicate in the same way that Suzanne does. As an exploration of innocence cynicism and faith I thought it worked well. The second theme behind the film is the nature of film making itself. Director as creator, divine in the created world. When the discussion of the eternity of the soul unfolds the contemporary flirtation with reincarnation is more a reflection of the directors role travelling between the lives he creates, than a simple populist diversion. Naive this might be, pretentious it is not.

Mindless dribble about the second coming of Christ in the form of a hippie and albino looking Sandra Locke. You have no idea what's happening on the screen with the irritating theme song "Suzanne" being played over and over throughout the movie until when "The Second Coming of Suzanne" is over you already know it by hard no matter how hard you try to forget the whole thing.

This off-the-wall armature movie maker Logan,Jared Martin, is out to make the movie of the century but is so rude and obnoxious that none in the banking world is willing to finance his project. Planning to go on his own Logan then spots this couple at a seaside café and is fascinated with the young woman Suzanne, Sandra Locke, who reminds him of someone he knew in another life: Jesus Christ.

With Logan's assistant and all around gofer Clavius, Richard Dreyfuss,somehow getting a $740,000.00 loan from the bank to finance Logan's masterpiece he starts to work on Suzanne by flattering her about her talent as an actress in order to get her interested to be in his film. This leads to Suzanne not only leaving her boyfriend artist Simon, Paul Sand, but later Simon being so depressed and feeling all alone takes a gun to his mouth and blows his brains out.

The movie also has two somewhat unrelated sub-plots in it that has to do with a young autistic girl Dorothy, Kari Avalos, who's cured of her autism by Suzanne after everyone else, at the psychiatric hospital that she was committed to,failed. It's not really known what exactly Suzanne was doing at the hospital but she seemed to be some kind of orderly or volunteer there; was this supposed to show us in the audience that she, like Jesus, could miraculously heal the sick?

There's also this newspaper columnist and big time businessman tycoon Jackson Sinclair, Gene Barry, who seems to be either going through a very difficult mid-life crisis or has seen a biblical-like vision that changed his life forever. Sinclair had been searching for the meaning of life as well as what it's all about all through the movie and wanted to know why there's all this suffering in the world, like this movie that he's in, and seemed to have found the answer when he first laid his eyes on Suzanne. Sinclair also got some sense knocked into his head when his private chauffeur David, Mark Rasmusser, who's gotten sick and tired of his weird and crazy hallucinations almost running him off a cliff in a kamikaze like drive along the Pacific Coast.

The movie "The Second Coming of Suzanne" goes on with a number of unrelated sequences, probably to fill or pad in some time by it's director and film editor, and then goes to it's final scene in a Christ-like crucification on a hill as Logan has all the cameras rolling. It turns out that the crazed Logan got so carried away with his masterpiece as he tried to replicate, on the helpless and tied up Suzanne, the actual crucification of Jesus Christ some 2,000 years ago.

Hard to sit through and almost impossible to follow "The Second Coming of Suzanne" puts you through the same kind torture that Suzanne is put through by Logan and the makers of the film. The movie tries to be arty but that's just an excuse to cover up it's brainless and non-existent storyline and even worse the terrible and amateurish acting by everyone in it.

Richard Dreyfuss is, indeed, in this flick, but in a rather small part. He is NOT the "obsessed" filmmaker - he's the group's business manager/accountant. Even the box describes the film inaccurately. There are no erotic scenes with Sondra Locke, as advertised, unless one uses the term "erotic" quite loosely. I would not have considered viewing the film without Richard Dreyfuss being in it as a major character. I might have, however, had I realized that the famous 60's anthem, Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," was an artistic influence. Other than the brief recitation of lines from the end of James Joyce's "Ulysses", and an interesting visual reference to the end of Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," I found it a poor attempt to meld symbolic elements and moods immortalized in films like "Last Year at Marianbad" and "Un Chien Andalou." If you like the idea of the eccentric artistic troupe, there are many superior films, ranging from "Bye, Bye, Brasil" to "Cecil B. Demented."

As a fan of obscure movies I found out about this little oddity and got a copy of it on DVD. I've always liked Sondra Locke and Richard Dreyfuss is OK in my book so I figure what the heck lets check it out.Man this film is a trip back in time for sure.All the surealness and hipness was very representative of the late 60's/early 70's era.As stated by another reviewer here it's story is incoherent and never does come together but you keep watching to see what happens in the end.It's bizarre but entertaining to a point.Dreyfuss was very young in this movie.Sondra Locke never looked better in any other movie I've seen her in.Maybe it was because she was being cast as a female Jesus but she does look divine as Suzanne.Handled by better filmmakers this could've been a really good film.As it is it's a good little novelty to see and reflect on how movie making has changed in the last 30+ years.A side note future director Penelope Spheeris is one of Logan's female disciples wearing mime style face paint.