Q: If you're thirty, how do you go about capitalizing on the fantasy of kissing a girl you knew back in high school with the same kind of youthful intensity that you would have brought to the kiss back in high school?

A: You write the script so that her teeth are studded with adult braces.

Eric Mendelsohn, writer and director of Judy Berlin, has done what precious few film makers try to do: He has attempted to present us with a film we haven't seen dozens of times before. His depiction of life in the town of Babylon, Long Island, is interesting, engaging, and enjoyable. But it isn't as original a piece as it seems to think it is--and the fact that so many of the parts are so derivative gives the whole a quality of mishmashy liftedness.

I applaud his decision to shoot in black and white, even if that decision was presumably prompted by his desire to make shooting during a supposed eclipse easier from a cinematographical standpoint. All the shots (apart from the one in which the sun appears to be eclipsed by a water tower rather than the moon) are beautiful and intimate.

Judy Berlin clearly owes a great deal to Todd Solondz' Happiness, but instead of concentrating on the conflicting desires and agendas of three sisters (and their love interests), Mendelsohn gives us two generations of romantic involvement between Gold men (Arthur and David) and Berlin women (Sue and Judy).

The action of the film takes place on a single day during which an eclipse begins shortly after noon and continues long after it has worn out its welcome. One of the funniest things in the film is the solace that people take in the fact that the streetlights come on in the afternoon. "They wouldn't turn the lights on if the eclipse wasn't supposed to last this long," various characters tell themselves reassuringly.

The day of the eclipse coincides with the departure of Judy Berlin (Edie Falco) for Hollywood. She is an aspiring actress who wants more from her career than a pantomiming role in one of those 'historical reenactment' villages and an occasional television commercial hawking dinette sets. And like most of the women in this film, she is both stupid and slightly unbalanced.

If I were required to oversimplify things, I would say the one thing that most obviously makes Mendelsohn the inferior of Solondz is the patronizing attitude that Mendelsohn brings to his depiction of women. When male characters such as Arthur and David Gold use polysyllabic terms such as 'dispensation' and even 'documentary,' their female auditors look at them with something in between admiration and ignorance. Alice Gold, a grown woman, doesn't understand the physics behind an eclipse and wants Arthur to explain the phenomenon to her. Sue Berlin (Barbara Barrie), a school teacher whose classroom has been invaded by a senile former teacher, calls on Arthur for help before even asking the woman to leave.

These are the failings of women: stupidity, helplessness, insanity, peevishness, possessiveness, senility.

These are the failings of men: ennui, infidelity, confusion, a tendency to judge things and people and ideas too harshly.

I'll admit that both sets of failings are fairly damning, but the flaws of the men have a redeemingly heroic quality (Manfred/Werther: ennui, Odysseus/Loman: infidelity, Lear/Hamlet: confusion, Oedipus/Ahab: the arrogance of judging harshly) that is wholly lacking from the shortcomings of the women.

Nevertheless, Mendelsohn's characters are engaging and believable enough for us to watch with keen interest as Arthur and David Gold at first resist but ultimately pursue Sue and Judy Berlin. David Gold (Aaron Harnick) is an out-of-work film maker who, at the age of thirty, has chosen to return home to live with his parents. His father thinks he is two years younger than he is; Judy Berlin thinks he is two years older--an eerie testament to the strangeness of those years between 28 and 32 when one feels that one is 'roughly thirty' and 'roughly where one expected to be'--'roughly' meaning 'approximately' in the first instance and 'not at all' in the second.

David talks to Judy about a documentary that he would like to make concerning Babylon, which Mendelsohn seems to be using as an associative substitute for the city of Babel. But the one thing David doesn't want is for his film to be sarcastic. Since Judy Berlin is not sarcastic, we may get the idea that the character (David) is talking about the germ for the film that the director (Mendelsohn) ultimately made. But David also insists that there shouldn't be any plot in his documentary and that it should be about capturing the golden light in the windows of homes. The anti-symmetrical love stories involving David and his father and the Berlin women constitute precisely as much 'plot' as we see in the average Hollywood release (though the explosions and the nudity may con us into thinking that the relationships of Bruce Willis and ______ have more depth than they do). And more importantly, the decision to shoot in black and white obviously precludes any possibility of catching the 'golden' light of sunset (particularly during an eclipse).

Judy Berlin, in other words, is different enough from the film that David Gold talks about making to raise the possibility of whether that divergence is itself sarcastic. In order to answer that question, we would have to pay attention to the details of the film; and the film itself presents two different schools of thought on the importance of detail.

The first approach to detail is articulated by the insane Alice Gold, who does a poor job of paraphrasing Chekov before launching into a fairly excellent paraphrase of Addie Bundren's tirade against language in As I Lay Dying. Words, it seems to Alice, are perfectly arbitrary. "Has there ever really been a Wednesday since the beginning of the world?" she wonders. Wednesday is as empty a signifier as noon or five o'clock or any of the words that we use to anchor ourselves in time and space.

But the film's response seems to be that we need that anchoring--arbitrary though it might be. On her way home from school, Sue Berlin encounters Dolores Engler (Betty Henritze), the senile former teacher who installed herself in Berlin's classroom earlier that day. "I forget things," says Dolores. "It'll be all right," Sue replies, pointing to a tree. "Tree," she says.

"Tree," Dolores repeats.

"Everything will be all right," says Sue.

The breach between humanity and language established by Alice seems to have been repaired by the patience of one teacher for another. Mendelsohn hasn't given us anything new after all. He's merely trotted out some of the same questions that have puzzled us for decades and pretended to 'answer' them by placing his various responses in a particular order. It's a testament to the fine acting (particularly of Barrie and Falco) that we have any sort of patience for such writerly legerdemain. But it is also a testament to Mendelsohn's skill as a director that he perceived what his fine cast would enable him to get away with.





Recommended: Yes