Choose Me (1984, Alan Rudolph) (Patreon)

77/100

Second or third viewing (I have no record), last seen sometime prior to 1996. Worst thing I can say is that the film doesn't live up to its joyously sensual opening-credits sequence; best thing I can say is that it comes tantalizingly close. Certainly the woozy, impulsive tone gets set within seconds, as extras bop their way out of Eve's to the sound of Teddy Pendergrass and shimmy down a neon-lit studio-backlot street, the camera eventually picking up Eve herself, from a distance/height (the formal choreography looks off-the-cuff despite being incredibly precise) as she makes her way to work. I happen to have rewatched Choose Me not long after seeing Annette, and while Rudolph didn't technically make a musical, this credits sequence serves more or less the same function as "So May We Start?": a declaration of aesthetic principles, explicitly acknowledging the impending creation of fantasy within an ostensible real-world milieu. 

This world's far more benign, to be sure. Even its occasional eruptions of violence tend to be faintly absurd, depicted as the awkward flailing of little boys, absent any hint of coolness. What's seductive here is the sincere curiosity almost every character has about every person they encounter. Only Dr. Nancy Love makes a living via conversation, but the others—including semi-peripheral figures like Rae Dawn Chong's Pearl—seem as if they're merely retaining their amateur status in order to compete in various breeze-shooting and flirtation events at the next Olympics. (Mickey would claim he's already won the silver, and eventually be revealed to have told the truth.) The movie's glory and its limitation are identical: It's been conceived in such a way that there's no particular interest in nor urgency regarding who will or won't end up with whom. All such questions seem secondary to the sheer pleasure of these people's company, the evident delight they take in sparring, quizzing, intently gazing. We're talking 95% pure mood here, vs. maybe 80% for The Moderns (my favorite Rudolph), which explores some ideas about art and authenticity between its sybaritic longueurs (and also upgrades significantly from Patrick Bauchau to John Lone). 

Both films feature Keith Carradine rocking a unique temperament that I can only think to call matter-of-factly ardent (he lets his eyes do all the work, putting no spin at all on the lines—an disarming disjunction) and Genevieve Bujold as a mediator with more skin in the game than she cares to admit. Lesley Ann Warren inhabits a (slightly) more psychologically credible middle ground between those two intense eccentrics, making Eve a woman who's taught herself to distrust her own desires and become despondent as a result. (She's basically Cheers' Rebecca without being the constant butt of cruel jokes.) Still, one could argue that Pendergrass is Choose Me's true star, given the way that Rudolph interpolates his songs into the action—most memorably when Mickey and Eve first kiss, the backup singers' refrain suddenly kicking in out of nowhere as he pulls her close. I wish music had a more emphatic presence at the end, especially w/r/t Nancy; the prospect of a dinner date with that frankly icky producer (who's now uninterested) is an odd note to leave her on. Teddy does resurface during the final shot, but he's competing with a gloss on The Graduate's famous ending (just one of the lovers looks uncertain, in this case), which I treasure so much that any invocation of it is distracting. So I don't exit on nearly the same high that I entered with. Still, a singular romantic sensibility in which I'm always happy to be immersed.