L.A. Roundelay

By JAY COCKS

ALOHA, BOBBY AND ROSE

Directed and Written by FLOYD MUTRUX

At the beginning of Joan Didion's novel Play It As It Lays, the numb and desperate heroine returns from a day spent driving along the Los Angeles freeways. She lies in her dark bedroom and stares at the ceiling, where freeway signs keep flashing overhead. It is a typical L.A. hallucination, part anxiety and part lassitude, and it comes to mind during this film. Aloha, Bobby and Rose could well be the next attraction on that ceiling.

Bobby (Paul Le Mat, of American Graffiti) is a goodhearted lunkhead whose brain is made of spare racing parts. His Camaro is his pride and his life source until Rose (Dianne Hull) hap pens along. Rose works behind the counter in one of those drive-up hash houses in the Valley, and she is foxy enough to give the Camaro some healthy competition for Bobby's affections. They meet one rainy day when Bobby, a mechanic, drives Rose's VW back from the garage. Soon the VW is left behind, along with Rose's five-year-old child, as the lovers take off for a weekend romance.

What brings Bobby and Rose together, besides fate and the exigencies of the script, is a little difficult to determine.

On the other hand, there is no commanding reason why they should not fall in love -- which is the quality of motivation throughout the film. Anyway, the romance of Bobby and Rose is a good deal more plausible than the grim and wholly unlikely fate Director-Writer Floyd Mutrux cooks up for them.

Shards of Culture. Aloha. Bobby and Rose is pretty silly, but it does capture well a certain scruffy, sunny-side-down quality of L.A. life. Mutrux and Cinematographer William A. Fraker have put the movie together out of shards of Southern California culture: rides along the Strip and across the border to Tijuana, burger stands and indoor ice-skating rinks, the patchy wilderness above the city along parts of Mulholland Drive. Mutrux can be affectionately funny about his characters. Rose describes how she blew her one good shot at fame -- on Let 's Make a Deal; a pal of Bobby's at the garage sees a bright future because he just got accepted to transmission school. But these lives are ironic artifacts rather than the stuff of high drama, which is what Mutrux would dearly like them to be. Pop culture is fine, but a Camaro is still not the ideal vehicle for tragedy, not even in L.A.

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