The Moderns (1988, Alan Rudolph) (Patreon)

88/100

Umpteenth viewing, last seen 2003...but first seen during its original theatrical release, when it was my introduction to Rudolph, most of these actors, and the general idea that a movie can subsist largely on style. Consequently, it's one of those formative late-'80s favorites that I can't be remotely objective about—just seeing the Art Deco font employed for the opening titles inspires a flood of nostalgic feeling. Plus you've got what's gun-to-my-head probably my single favorite film score, to which I used to listen, back in the Discman days, on the bus or subway virtually every time it rained, getting soaked by its plangent mystery. (Adjective courtesy of Sid Page's violin, noun supplied by Ed Mann's marimba.) Rudolph uses Isham's music quite prominently throughout, even during scenes with copious dialogue; there's plenty of narrative here, but it's always subordinate to sustaining a wistfully romantic mood. And I zeroed in this time on ways in which Rudolph's drifting camera is distinct from Altman's, despite the unmistakable influence. Altman liked to create the illusion of visual serendipity, as if he were accidentally stumbling onto arresting moments. Rudolph choreographs much more openly. So we get exquisite shots like a close-up of Nick at the café that rack-focuses to Rachel looking in through the window behind him, then back to Nick, at which point another woman enters frame from left and offers to pose nude for him (in unsubtitled French), gets turned down, and leaves, all as she circles Nick's back, initiating a slow pullback that eventually follows the woman left as she exits, thereby revealing that Rachel is now sitting right beside Nick at his table. Elegance that's immediately punctured by a magnificently brittle exchange (between two characters we've been led to believe have never previously met, but who in fact are married): "Do you want me to leave?" "You're good at it."

Were I discovering The Moderns today, without a decades-long emotional attachment, I might be more inclined to fault Rudolph and co-screenwriter Jon Bradshaw (who I hadn't realized died right before the film was shot; it's his sole IMDb credit) for at best tenuously equating the commodification of art with Rachel's unappealing choice between being a wealthy collector's trophy wife or a starving artist's muse. Her outburst on the bridge, while accurate and cathartic, comes out of nowhere, which makes it feel like a hasty clean-up effort by two men who've belatedly realized that they created a beautiful appendage rather than a person. Likewise, I've never really bought Stone's suicide, though it's arguably justified by Nick's vision of him escaping the grave à la Houdini—a fantastic inexplicable payoff to a throwaway plant. And I'm torn on the film's use of Hemingway, which involves some really dumb jokes (American tourists mistaking him for Fitzgerald; Oiseau telling him to keep working on Paris as a "portable banquet") but works quite well as a one-man Greek chorus of meaningless epigrams. (Plus the bit where he keeps referring to people by the names he's invented for their fictional counterparts is priceless.) But that's about as much objective criticism as I can muster, and it's all outweighed just by e.g. the oddly emphatic cadence that Bujold employs as Madame Valentin, or the painted backdrops that stand in for Paris (a budgetary solution that's also thematically apropos). The Moderns has plenty to say about modernity—even if Rudolph cheats a little by shifting MoMA's opening from 1929 to 1926—and incisively explores some of the same heady questions regarding value and authenticity that were posed by My Kid Could Paint That. But it's mostly Rudolph's sensibility itself—his oddball amalgam of cynical and romantic—that thrills me. This was my first hit, and that's always nearly impossible to top.