With the exception of Phantom of the Paradise (1974), a
cult-fave rock musical that some people find quite droll, director Brian De
Palma has delivered only middling results when making comedies. In fact, some
of his worst flops, including The Bonfire
of the Vanities (1990), were supposed to make people laugh. So it’s mildly
interesting that several of De Palma’s earliest features are comedies, since he
didn’t find his sweet spot of sexualized horror until Sisters (1973). Anyway, De Palma’s fourth feature—also his first of
the ’70s—is the eclectic Hi, Mom!,
which uses a loose storyline about an ambitious young filmmaker to frame sketches
about art, class, race, and sex. The picture is a sequel to De Palma’s earlier
film Greetings (1968), and Robert De
Niro stars in both pictures as edgy New Yorker Jon Rubin.
When we meet the
character in Hi, Mom!, Jon is a
struggling filmmaker who uses a telescope to peer into neighbors’ windows, then
persuades a skin-flick producer, Joe Banner (Allen Garfield), to fund a porno
movie shot in the peeping-tom style. Later, Jon spots a cute woman named Judy
Bishop (Jennifer Salt), who lives in the building across the street, and
seduces her by pretending to be an insurance salesman. (Classy ulterior motive:
Filming their sexual encounters without her permission for use in porn.) Also
thrown into the mix is a group of black-power activists, because Jon makes
grungy black-and-white verité-style short films in which the activists confront
white New Yorkers with performance art challenging widespread attitudes toward
African-Americans.
Stylistically, Hi,
Mom! is a mess. Some scenes are played for broad humor, some are
politically provocative, some are sleazy, and some are nearly frightening
because of their intensity. One gets the sense that De Palma, who cowrote the
picture with Charles Hirsch, either made the story up as he went along, or that
the filmmakers created a laundry list of hip topics without giving much
consideration to how things might (or might not) cohere. Bits of the movie are
interesting (although not particularly funny), especially the man-0n-the-street
vignettes that De Palma seems to have captured with hidden cameras. Yet the
lack of an organizing aesthetic makes the overall experience rather boring. It
doesn’t help that rock musician Eric Kaz contributed an inanely upbeat score
complete with a clumsy theme song, or that De Niro is woefully out of his
element. The actor didn’t find his sense of humor till much later in life, and
he only really catches fire during a scene in which Jon auditions to play an
abusive policeman.
Hi, Mom!:
FUNKY
No comments:
Post a Comment