Les amants éternels

I saw this film at the Telluride Film Festival. People were walking out, but I stuck it out. Wish I hadn't. Shlocky story, contrived and boring characters. The only thing mildly interesting was to see the revenge plot play out and that was a disapointment as well. Pass on this one.

There is a mystery at the heart of Forever Mine, the most recent downturn in writer-director Paul Schrader's roller coaster of a career. The mystery involves a man in the first class section of an airplane to New York, circa 1987. The man looks a little bit like Joseph Fiennes, but he is wearing a goofy make-up job to imply scarring and he is speaking with a goofy accent to add intrigue. And thus the mystery can be summed up with a series of questions: Who? Who is this man? What? What is he going to New York to do, dressed as a drug dealer? And Why? Why would anybody cast Joseph Fiennes for a part that required acting? Sure, Fiennes is perfectly skilled at looking soulful, but anything beyond that -- accent, characterization, etc -- is out of his range.

We cut quickly from the plane to "14 years earlier" where we see Fiennes again, now much younger. We know he's younger because he isn't scarred and he doesn't have a goatee. He also isn't speaking with a thick Cuban accent anymore. He has a strange accent that waffles between British, "American," and "Latino." Fiennes is Alan, a cabana boy at a Miami resort. His friend Javier is trying to convince him that he should enter the drug game to make some real money. But Alan has clearly seen DePalma's Scarface, Blow, and a number of other drug movies and he has more legitimate dreams, starting, apparently, with bedding the wife (Gretchen Mol) of a New York businessman (Ray Liotta). Alan and the wife, Ella, begin perhaps the most public affair in cinema history. They make out down the beach from her husband, they get all kissy at local bars, and then have emotional conversations outside her hotel room. And the husband doesn't find out. But then it's time for the couple leave, but soulful Fiennes cannot let Ella go. We're not really sure why, though. As a character, she's a total cypher. Schrader gives her one or two expositional confessional moments, but that's about it.

So of course the relationship is at least temporarily doomed. But in Schrader's universe we knew that before Alan and Ella even kissed, because we know that she's Catholic and that guilt and morality will quickly come into play. As with several other Schrader works, religious fervor is the central plot device, which leads to Alan's deformity, Ella's regret, and the film's film act.

Beyond the Catholicism, though, there's not much at stake in Forever Mine. The two leads have minimal chemistry and the film is plagued by constant continuity errors and cliched plotting. I was troubled by the fact that the 14 years between the flashback and the framing device had done nothing to age any of characters. And I was perplexed by the fact that even though Alan's friend Javier starts out as the the man with the connections, he ends up as a glorified servant. I didn't understand why Schrader couldn't be bothered to develop either Ella's character or that of her husband. And I was just annoyed by Fiennes's inconsistantcy as an actor.

Schrader seems to be having fun with his own background and the backgrounds of his actors. There appear to be obvious references to Goodfellas and Taxi Driver, while Fiennes's 1987 persona has a strange similarity to Robert DeNiro. And all of the elements seemed to have been in place for a fine film. This was Schrader's follow-up to the minor masterpiece Affliction and Fiennes's follow-up to Shakespeare in Love. It was also Mol's first starring role after Vanity Fair jumped the gun and made her an "It" Girl shortly before the release of several small parts. But really nothing comes together. Schrader plots an affair without any twists or originality beside the Catholic guilt that have always fueled his violent Graham Greene-esque visions. The political context that justifies the period setting is hardly worth the effort. The drug subplot goes nowhere. And when Ella sits reading Madame Bovary to a group of senior citizens, the symbolism is just infantile.

Forever Mine never was released in theaters because the company producing it went under. It premiered on Starz! and moved to video. It's hard to imagine it having any real box office potential under any circumstances. This film is a 3/10 at best.

We all know that Paul Schrader is a sober son of the Dutch

Reformation Church. Still, I'd love to have a taste of the

crack he was smoking when he wrote this flaming lulu, a

painfully sincere and heartfelt tribute to undying love that

suggests Stanley Kubrick singing "Love Theme from Mahogany" a cappella.

Apparently an attempt to capture the spirit of Scott Spencer's novel "Endless Love" (so famously lost by Franco Zeffirelli), FOREVER MINE posits Joseph Fiennes

(he of the smoldering, gotta-have-you eyebrows) as a Miami cabana boy who messes with the wrong guy's wife--Gretchen Mol as the secretarial cutie who married

gnarly Mr. Big (Ray Liotta). Before you can say AGAINST

ALL ODDS, Mr. Big is coming down hard on Cabana Boy--only, in Schrader's world, this means more mutilations, burials alive, disguises, funny accents, and

villainous moustache-twirlings than in the entirety of

Shakespeare's CYMBELINE.

Schrader claimed he wanted to go back to the nineteenth

century. And indeed, the over-the-top melodrama suggests

a desperate attempt to flee fin-de-siecle irony. But it's

always a train wreck when cerebral directors try to let go of

their book-learning and Open Themselves to Feeling. FOREVER MINE suggests a cable-movie version of Robert Bresson's two wackadoody salutes to cute young boys, FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER and THE DEVIL PROBABLY; Fiennes greets Mol in a seedy motel room on which he has spray painted the words, "GIVE ALL TO LOVE." (That was the tagline of the movie's abortive theatrical run.) Like Kubrick in EYES WIDE SHUT, Schrader

tries to peel off his layers of coldness and ratiocination--but

any movie that opens with a quote from Walter Pater suggests that the filmmaker is more suited to analyzing

melodrama than expressing it.

For all the tropical gloss put on it by the great cinematographer John Bailey, FOREVER MINE has a giggle-inducing quality that's unique even to bad Schrader

movies. (In one scene, Fiennes leaves an ambivalent Mol

in her hotel room. As he walks away, he bumps his head

into a palm frond, stops, and seems to look back at the

palm frond. Fade to black. Does Schrader equate Douglas

Sirk with Ed Wood?) Now that he's expressed his inner lovesick sap, maybe Schrader can go back to who he really

is--a cold, alienated, God-haunted, overeducated freak

from Michigan who's also the greatest living writer of

movies.

I watched this film at the Torun camerimage festival in Poland.The whole audience was in stitches, which would have been fine except this was supposed to be a romance. How a renowned scriptwriter like Paul Schrader managed to come up with such bunkum is unfathomable! Watching it reminded me of the scene in Singing in the Rain, where the audience is in uproar at the unsynchronised sound. The whole experience was surreal! I promise you, you won't see a bigger turkey than this all year - Ed Wood would have been proud of it!

Forever Mine is not a good movie. Many other reviewers on this site have pointed out why.

But let's give credit where credit is due.

Cinematographer John Bailey did a magnificent, Oscar-worthy job on this film! It looks great. The first half takes place in Miami in 1973. I lived in Miami in the early 70's, and this film caught the feel of it so beautifully that I could smell the Cafe Cubano, hear the Jai-Alai cheers, and feel the sea breezes. The pastels, the faded glory of the hotels, the neon lights, the whole palette.

John Bailey can't be blamed for Forever Mine's script, or its legal problems, but the result of those problems must have been depressing for him because nobody ever saw Bailey's work projected on the big screen after the film festivals. That's really a shame. This film was meant to be projected in a 2.35 aspect ratio, and that simply can't be appreciated anywhere except a big screen. Of course, Bailey didn't know it would go straight-to-cable-and-DVD when he filmed it in that super widescreen ratio.

By the way, this work was no isolated fluke for Mr. Bailey, as you might guess. He has never won an Oscar, or even a nomination, but he's shot some very fine films in his career. He probably should have been nominated for an Oscar for his work on The Big Chill, and he has shot some terrific offbeat stuff, like Cat People and Groundhog Day.

So, a strong "well done" for Mr Bailey, for work that few people will ever see.