Remember My Name (1978, Alan Rudolph) (Patreon)

72/100

Here's what I'm gonna remember: Geraldine Chaplin grabbing hold of Alfre Woodard by both nipples while simultaneously kneeing her in the stomach. 

Rudolph's best films excel at introducing characters who exude mystery and a little bit of danger, tantalizing us for ages with the question of who they are and what their fucking deal is. Still, I was unprepared for the level of ruthless eccentricity that Chaplin attains here as Emily, a woman whose not-quite-comically direct, brusque manner (nowadays it's tempting to place her on the autistic spectrum, though I'm sure nobody thought of that at the time) and barely controlled hostility can't help but make one uneasy about why she's spying on Anthony Perkins' married construction worker. Before too long, it becomes clear that this is a movie about a possibly deranged stalker, like Fatal Attraction told from Glenn Close's point of view (albeit with a very different backstory)...and yet Emily remains Remember's sole identification figure, not just because she's narratively privileged but also by virtue of her being so much more arresting than everyone else onscreen, and on most other screens as well. Rudolph's films rarely seem improvised, either in performance or (certainly) in camera movement, but I suspect he gave Chaplin a certain amount of license to just fuck with people; when Emily asks Harry, a fellow employee at Mr. Nudd's store—let us pause momentarily to relish baby-faced Jeff Goldblum playing a fellow named Mr. Nudd—to give her a ride on his motorcycle, Jeff Perry (whom I did not recognize at that age) seems to be trying to deliver his scripted lines and getting legitimately flustered by Emily/Geraldine's repeated pointless interruptions. And that exquisitely sets up the exchange's conclusion, when Emily simply steps off the back of the motorcycle as Harry drives away without her. 

I'd somehow gotten the impression, while waiting for an opportunity (that never surfaced) to see Rudolph's early films at a NYC rep house, that Welcome to L.A. and Remember My Name, though "true" Rudolph films in a way that Premonition and Terror Circus are not, borrowed heavily from Altman, and that his own style didn't mature until Choose Me. We'll see about Welcome, at some point, but his aesthetic and temperament are pretty much fully formed here, with even the structural use of Alberta Watson's songs anticipating what he'd later do with Teddy Pendergrass. Certainly it's impossible to imagine Altman conceiving of the sequence in which Emily breaks into the Currys' house*, with its bizarre vacillation in who represents a physical threat, culminating in a brief knife-to-knife standoff between Emily and Barbara that I'm now realizing is extremely difficult to coherently describe, you really have to see it happen. Or the whole woozy let's-work-our-way-up-the-drinks-menu-starting-with-terrible-zombies bit. For a while, I thought Perkins had been badly miscast, but his extreme angularity works for him once he starts sharing scenes with Chaplin—Neil looks like Emily behaves, making it easier to believe that they were once together and might be again. Remember My Name lacks the communal expanse of my favorite Rudolphs (Choose Me and The Moderns), allowing one figure to thoroughly dominate, and the ending, though emotionally satisfying, suffers from a certain lack of clarity; I think we're meant to perceive Neil as left symbolically trapped in his small, shoddy life, but would be wary of testifying to that effect in a court of cinematic interpretation. But I'm pleased to discover, finally, that this director was blazing his own path more or less from the outset, creating films that could have come from nobody else (Altman included). 

* Rudolph situates this house in a major flight path, so that we're constantly hearing airplanes flying low overhead—a nice, understated touch that becomes a bit ghastly when you know that Berry Berenson, who plays Barbara (and who was Anthony Perkins' wife, Oz Perkins' mother), died on American Flight 11.