New York Stories. - movie reviews

NEW YORK STORIES comprises three short films about some aspects of New York life by three major moviemakers: Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Woody Allen. The extremely tenuous link is the locale, New York, somewhat arbitrarily assigned. The less obvious but more relevant connection is that none of them comes off, raising the question of whether the filmed short story-for that is what we are ultimately dealing with-works as a genre.

There was a time, during the Forties, when the short-story film had its flowering. Most successful, perhaps, was Quartet (1948), based on four stories by Somerset Maugham, followed, at intervals, by two more Maugham omnibuses. Though there was no connecting link other than the common authorship, there were homogenizing elements: magnificent British character actors and such formidable screenwriters as R. C. Sherriff, Noel Langley, T. E. B. Clarke, Arthur Macrae, and Willie himself. The genre had its Hollywood counterpart, notably in a film such as Tales of Manhattan (1942-observe the similarity of title to New York Stories), where the connection was a suit of tails that went from owner to owner, ever lower on the social scale, until it ended on a scarecrow. Here, too, there was a fancy international cast of actors and writers (the latter included four Hungarians beaded by Molnar himself), and the director was the famed Julien Duvivier.

The genre peaked with Dead of Night (1945), in which every macabre ghost story was cunningly connected to a central nightmare framework; again, a dazzling array of writers, directors, and actors was involved, and Michael Redgrave gave possibly his finest screen performance. As hourlong television dramas became the order of the day, the cinematic triptych or polyptych lost its uniqueness and died out. It popped up occasionally in such places as Italy and Japan, but fell into disuse in English until, suddenly, we have New York Stories.

Once again three leading filmmakers were involved, but though Woody Allen wrote his own script as usual, the other screenplays were by lesser eminences, and the casts for all three episodes could not match the roster for one in the three aforementioned classics of the genre. And the styles of the present three episodes are as vastly divergent as their plots, so that there is no unity of mood, which damagingly yields an uncumulative, fracturing effect.

The film begins with Martin Scorsese'"Life Lessons," which purports to be a candid look at the New York art scene, mostly downtown but also uptown. It was written by Richard Price, a rising young novelist but also the screenwriter, alas, for The Color of Money. Though Price remotely bases himself on Dostoyevsky and does get off the odd pungent line, he cannot make the story of a womanizing painter's obsession with a young womanpart disciple, part assistant, mostly mistress-very interesting or even very different. Lionel Dobie is a highly successful abstract artist who paints immense canvases in a frenzy of-I guess I'll have to call it creativity, though the stuff (executed by Chuck ConnelIy) strikes me as rubbish. Paulette, the young woman in question, has run off to Florida with a performance artist; Lionel has a show opening soon for which he is behind; he refuses to let his dealer see what he is doing-the usual near-cliches, out of which a more inspired writer might just barely have made something.

Paulette, whom the other guy has dumped, returns; she says she's leaving Lionel but he prevails upon her to stay on-platonically-in the little bedroom above the loft's main floor. Lionel prowls about and tries to get her to sleep with him, but is rejected. They go to an uptown art party where she makes him even more jealous. He looks at her latest paintings and condescendingly finds some improvement. (They are by Susan Hambleton, and considerably better than Dobie's daubs.) We go to a performance piece by aforesaid performance artist and there is more jealousy. Paulette phones her mother in the Midwest and gets permission to come home. More jealous scenes; Paulette gets her Marine brother to help her move out while Lionel paints and pouts with parallel fury. At his opening, Lionel meets another willing, pretty young woman who will clearly become Paulette's successor.

I go into the plot to show you the humdrumness of it. The point was to establish parallels between the painter's obsessions with his work and with his woman. Obsessiveness is the key, and Scorsese tries to direct the movie in an obsessive manner, in which he regrettably succeeds. Together with his splendid cinematographer, Nestor Almendros, he puts to use every trick known to the cinema: slow motion, extreme closeups, weird changes of camera angle, monochromatic shots in various colors, zoom shots galore, iris shots, jagged editing-you name it. An entire introductory course in filmmaking is deployed in speeded-up foreshortening. The idea is to create a sort of action filming equivalent to action painting.