Electra Shocks

A granite-faced seaman sits waiting in a saloon. The voice behind him is soft and beckoning. He rises and holds the pregnant girl in his arms. The beaming, reunited couple could be lovers --but they are father and daughter. By the time her common-law husband joins the pair, it is clear that riverrun becomes Electra.

In past films (Crazy Quilt, Funnyman), Director John Korty has shown a predilection for whimsy. Here, almost as a reaction, he presents a stark, lean story of a young couple who go back to the land to scratch out some meaning. They have abandoned Berkeley, and now raise sheep in the ineffable Northern California coast. To the couple, it is an act of love; to the old man, the idyl is pointless and backward. He insists on staying with the unmarried couple until the baby comes, and snipes at their supernatural way of life. As the wrangle intensifies, Korty alleviates the strain with scenes of a vanishing existence--of undisturbed salt flats, of a newborn lamb on the grass, of vast, unsaturated skies. It is here that his affectations are replaced by affections.

When he returns to people, Korty too frequently resorts to stagy flashbacks of the girl's early life without father. They are references that could have been said better than seen. The story's climax of simultaneous birth and death attempts primitive art; only the birth succeeds.

The young couple (Louise Ober and Mark Jenkins) are simple and skilled enough to give the story some credence, but it is John McLiam as the bitter patriarch who grants it soul. It is a mark of his intelligence that he makes his tilted, villainous part understandable, and astonishingly sympathetic.

riverrun takes its title from the opening of Finnegans Wake: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay . . ." The literary allusion is an unnecessary device; Korty's pace and McLiam's face are enough to supply this wry, wispy film with a valid life of its own.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.