Anaesthesia

By Stefan Kanfer

Desperate Characters are neither desperate nor characters. This shockingly overwritten, overpraised work is the result of minor talents pursuing significance like hounds chasing after an endangered species. The film employs all the stock subjects of contemporary fiction, from the insensitive husband (Kenneth Mars) to the anaesthetized heroine (Shirley MacLaine). Her name is Sophie, a Manhattan housewife compelled to wander glassily through Frank D. Gilroy's scenario like a science-fiction victim: The Woman Without a Brain.

On her journey to nowhere, Sophie caroms off a number of archetypes over-familiar to readers of the urban novel: eunuchoid males, knife-edged women's libertarians, garrulous old leftists, jittery blacks. To make Sophie's affliction even more puzzling, she is given an external symbol--a bite by a cat that may or may not be rabid. Is the plague external? Or does it lie within?

The answer must be met with a Sophie-like acedia from the viewer. This pseudoexistential drama is the celluloid version of novocain, deadening whatever--or whomever--it touches. Events are talked about, not shown. Sophie deals in fatuous aphorisms ("Answering services are for muffling the services of the dying"). Her acquaintances reply with even more glittering zircons. One character, admiring a pair of inexpensive Italian shoes, hoots, "What multitudes we recline on!"

More is expected from the man who wrote The Subject Was Roses. Peculiarly enough, when Gilroy stops writing and starts directing, he shows talent. A hospital waiting room is shown, quite accurately, to be a zone where all experience--even pain--becomes banal; a rural retreat is made a place far more sinister than an evening street in the city. Shirley MacLaine, in a couple of tasteful nude scenes, puts aside her perennial mask of lovable kook to show herself as a woman of very attractive middle age. Like a good many former celebrities these days, she remains a star in search of a firmament.

Stefan Kanfer

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