Arts/Review

Vargas Llosa novel
makes transition
to big screen

TUNE IN TOMORROW. Starring Peter
Falk, Keanu Reeves and Barbara Her-
shey. Directed by Peter Amiel. Based on
the novel, Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter, by Mario Vargas Llosa. At
Cineplex Odeon theatres.

Peter Falk is one of the reasons to see
Tune in Tomorrow, a genial comedy that
celebrates eccentricity as an answer to mid-
dle-American smugness. The veteran TV
and screen star best known for his portrayal
of detective Colombo shows his ability to
adopt a different character here, and displays
a penchant for mimicry.

The second reason is simple curiosity: to
see what happens to a story written by a
renowned Peruvian author — Mario Vargas
Llosa (an unsuccessful candidate for presi-
dent in Peru’s recent election) — when it is
carried from Lima to New Orleans, and
given an American accent.

In the main, it works, although the grand
satiric vision of Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia
and the Scriptwriter is necessarily reduced,
and modified, in this U.S. screen adaptation.
But in setting the action in Louisiana’s capi-
tal, the filmmakers obviously tried to retain
the Latin feel of the novel. New Orleans,
with its crumbling omate architecture and
steamy passions, and home to an upper class
that borders on aristocracy, generates the
same kind of conflicts, resolved through
ironic humour, as the major cities of many
Latin American countries,

Falk plays Pedro Carmichael, a delight-
ful curmudgeon of mysterious origin and
motivation, a writer of melodramatic radio
soaps in an era just before television took
over. Our first vision of him is from the back:
a black-clad figure hunched over a
typewriter in a Detroit radio station, uncon-
cemed by the screams of its fleeing oc-
cupants. Seconds later, the building is deton-
ated by an explosion; but the mysterious
figure, unharmed, departs from a side exit
and disappears into the night. :

When he next appears, Carmichael,
newly employed at a New Orleans radio
station seeking to boost sagging ratings, is
engaged in a tussle with a young radio news
writer over possession of a typewriter. But
Marty (Keanu Reeves) soon finds himself
captivated by the forceful personality of the
seedy, diminutive Carmichael — especially
since he appears to be an ally in Marty’s
assiduous courting of his middle-aged rela-
tive Julia (Barbara Hershey), the family’s
black sheep who has returned to New Or-
leans after 20 years and two disastrous mar-
riages in New York.

“God, I hate men — and I’ve got to find

me one, fast,” remarks Julia, summing up a
character who is buffeted and confused, but
essentially untamed by life’s vicissitudes.

The growing relationship between Julia
and Marty is a brewing scandal in a town
marked by spontaneity and sexuality while
tuled by archaic laws. Their Fifties-proper
and prosperous family could not abide such
a liaison; but its members are enraptured by
Carmichael’s soap opera, in which scandal
beneath the surface of propriety offers daily
titillation.

The line separating art and life is being
bridged however, as a horrified Marty dis-
covers that supposedly private conversa-
tions between himself and Julia are repeated
verbatim on the air. Carmichael, who fre-
quently dons costumes to get the feel of his
fictionalized characters, is practising his
philosophy of “impacted reality.”

The irascible scriptwriter is also causing
problems on another front. While the ears of
New Orleans are glued to the radio, the
station is receiving some unwanted atten-
tion: daily protests and threats engendered
by the serial’s offhanded derogatory refer-
ences to Albanians.

Viewers need not be offended by the
manufactured ethnic slur. This film handles
it with the same degree of unreality as did
Vargas Llosa’s novel, in which Argentineans
were the victims of the scriptwriter’s venom.
The charges are deliberately absurd, and
hence the effect is blunted.

The problem with this film is the ration-
ale for the attacks. Aunt Julia and the Script-
writer revealed a motive that was comical
because it was anti-climactic. The film’s
producers decline to borrow this, and instead
have Carmichael claiming something to the
effect that hate is as intense an emotion as
love. It is an unsatisfying explanation, even
within the realm of comedy, for actions that
inflame people to violence.

This film makes more direct links than
the novel between the socially accepted
melodrama on the radio and real-life ac-
tivities of people that make them victims of
hypocritical opprobrium. And it has some
fun with the circular notion that life influen-
ces art influences life.

Tune in Tomorrow also features the story
within the story, with wonderfully hammy
scenes from Carmichael’s scripts. Marred
by some Hollywood excesses, it still
manages to capture much of the wit and
mood of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,
itself well worth investigating. Vargas Llosa
is a latter-day conservative who espouses
Reaganomic solutions, but his own litera-
ture belies his politics.

—Dan Keeton

Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons: the power of money.

‘Legal’ film targets
upper-class decadence

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE. Starring
Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Ron Silver.
Directed by Barbara Schroeder. At
Famous Players theatres.

We're here to make our case for talking
‘about a film that tells the true-life story about
how a socially conscious public defender
got an aristocrat convicted of twice attempt-
ing to murder his wealthy wife off the hook.

*Please the court: Law professor and
part-time lawyer Alan Dershowitz, played
forcefully by Ron Silver, explains this in an
argument with one of his students. She
rebels at being part of the legal team that
seeks to overturn the evidence that con-
victed Claus von Bulow of trying to kill his
estranged wife Sunny by a potentially lethal
overdose of insulin. The Danish-born Briton
von Bulow is a cold, arrogant snob who is
obviously guilty and the world has enough
misogynists going free as it is. Why should
a lawyer who only takes on cases defending
society’s disadvantaged want to represent
the legal appeal of such a creep?

Because, Dershowitz explains forcefully,
von Bulow was convicted on evidence
gathered through a private investigator hired
by Sunny’s children from her previous mar-
riage, and tumed over to a hired prosecutor.
The conviction reeked of the power of
money. What happens when this precedent
sets the tone for privatized prosecution of
poor schnooks who haven’t the resources to
fight it?

Granted, once this explanation is given,
we hear no more of it. We are, however,
reminded of Dershowitz’s commitment to
the oppressed through a series of telephone
conversations concerning two other clients.
The Johnson brothers, black, are.on death

~ row after being found guilty of murders their

father committed after they engineered his
jail break. Typical racist justice.

CONCERTS: Canadian singer of
songs Celtic and other shades, Loreena
McKennitt, performs Wednesday, Nov.
28-Saturday, Dec. 1 at the Vancouver
East Cultural Centre. Concerts, co-
sponsored by the centre and the Vancou-
ver Folk Music Festival, begin at 8 p.m.
Tickets are $15 Wednesday-Thursday,
$17 Friday-Saturday. Phone 254-9578 to
reserve.

And don’t miss Pete Seeger Hosts
Sing Out!, a multi-artist celebration of the
40th anniversary of Sing Out!, the folk
music magazine. It’s on at the Orpheum

Seeger marks 40 years of Sing Out!

in Vancouver on Sunday, Dec. 2, 8 p.m.
and features Seeger, Stephen Fearing,
Mae Moore, Themba Tana, Uzume
Taiko, Bob Bossin and Shingoose. Spon-
sored by the Vancouver Folk Music Fes-
tival. Tickets at Ticketmaster, 280-4444.

ART: The work of New York artists
Donald Moffett and Felix Gonzalez-
Torres are on display at the UBC Fine
Arts Gallery, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-
Friday, and noon-5 p.m. Saturday, until
Dec. 22. The exhibit, entitled “Strange
Ways, Here We Come,” deals with homo-

phobia and AIDS. Related exhibits, AIDS
Demographics and Looking at the
Revolution, are on display at the Front
Gallery, 1-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, until
Dec. 9. The UBC Fine Arts Gallery is at
1956 Main Mall, University of B.C. cam-
pus; Front Gallery, 303 East 8th Ave.

The Vancouver Art Gallery is show-
ing videotapes by American feminist ar-
tists until Jan. 13. Entitled, “What Does
She Want?,” the videos examine family
roles and relationships, female desires
and sexuality, how media defines identity
and gender.

10° Pacific Tribune, November 26, 1990

We admit that this film is mainly about
the intricacies of law, the manufacturing of
evidence, and the right of everyone to a legal
defence — even if it seems they are guilty
as hell. And we confess admiring Reversal
of Fortune because it contains damn fine
acting, intelligent dialogue and focused
direction — rare enough in mainstream
cinema these days.

Sterling performances come. from
Jeremy Irons as the icy von Bulow, who
perversely tells bad jokes that seem to impli-
cate him in the murder. And from Close, who
depicts a neurotic heiress effectively without
robbing her of some of our sympathy. Os-
tentatiously wealthy Sunny may be un-
pleasant, spoiled and a bad selector of hus-
bands, but those stone mansions on Rhode
Island can be prisons as well, and women
born into them have severely limited
choices.

Silver portrays Dershowitz as one of
those meat-and-potatoes educated guys, a
man who lives in a ramshackle house with
marginal housekeeping and who loves dis-
cussing legal points and basketball with his
teenaged son. They have a great relation-
ship, and even though Dershowitz’s love life
is not as good (a former lover and member
of his legal team hits on him for being more
concemed about his clients), it’s obvious
that his lifestyle is meant to present the
decent alternative to the decadence of
wealth.

Maybe the way we’re being set up for this
message is too obvious at times, but Silver
makes it easy for us to digest his street-wise
manner of making fine legal distinctions.
Especially when he’s trading points with his
multi-ethnic legal team, which has taken up
residence in his house to work around-the-
clock on the case.

And this film is so good it makes it easy
to accept the device of having the comatose
Sunny — who is still alive, but legally brain-
dead — narrate the sequence of events, past
and present.

Further evidence? Reversal of Fortune
has all those scenes that make legal-type
movies good: the lab tests to overturn pre-
vious evidence, the legal discussions, skul-
duggery and the unfolding sequence of
events. And a human heart at the core. The
only ingredient missing is the courtroom
arguments, and since we already know Der-
showitz succeeded in overturning von
Bulow’s conviction, it isn’t necessary.

And the film comes from at least liberal,
if not left field, and poses an implicit ques-
tion: who the hell needs the decadent rich?

__ The defence rests.
—D.K.