Consciousness As Soap

By * J.C.

MEMORY OF US

Directed by H. KAYE DYAL Screenplay by ELLEN GEER

Betty and Brad have a comfortable suburban home, two kids, a housekeeper, bullfight posters on the wall and multivolumes of Will and Ariel Durant on the bookshelves. They are not happy, a condition that has only fleetingly to do with children or interior decoration. Brad plays around; Betty plays alone.

"Here's a secret," she confides at the beginning of Memory of Us, assuming --probably incorrectly--that anyone wants to hear. It seems that she is happiest in a tacky little room she rents in the Starlite Motel, where she can practice photography, be by herself a few hours a day to "work things out," or just "drift." All of us, sad to say, drift with her, back to the early days of her marriage, when she would thread a string from the bedroom to the front door of their little apartment and affix a note for Brad: "Roses are red, violets are blue/ Follow this string to an extra-special screw." Other recollections include birth ("Funny," Betty ruminates, "how you forget the actual pain and power of birth --maybe so you'll try again"), the confession of Brad's first infidelity ("I forgive you," Betty responds promptly), and daily rounds like picking the kids up at school ("You know," Betty confesses to the family mutt, "we've got a lot in common--we're both retrievers").

One day Brad (Jon Cypher) tracks Betty to her motel room and concludes that she is either having an affair or a breakdown. Unequipped to deal with either possibility, he has one stopgap measure: he wants to join up with a clan of swingers and swappers. Betty, usually a glutton for punishment, draws the line. The last scene shows her taking one of the two family cars and heading for an uncertain dawn. That she picks the station wagon with the fake wood paneling on the side to drive off in does not bode well for the future.

Memory of Us is unsparingly earnest, a quality that may excuse its foolishness without diminishing it. The movie also presents a fairly melancholy prospect with its heartfelt but trite treatise written by a woman, Ellen Geer, who also plays the lead. It is long past time now for movies made by and about women, but no one could have expected or wanted Memory of Us, which has less in common with heightened consciousness than with daytime soap opera. The movie is so thin and weepy that it inadvertently contradicts its intention and turns into what it was trying to avoid, a stereotypical example of what has been known so condescendingly, for so long, as a "woman's picture."

* J.C.

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