Rah! Rah! Rah!?

By John Skow

HEAD OVER HEELS Directed and Written by Joan Micklin Silver

Two and a half cheers! Two and three quarters? Not enough, in these cheerless times. Let's say three cheers and a quark for Head over Heels, an eccentric little comedy about what zoologists call pair bonding. The trouble with the pair on view is that only half of it, an unsteady young man named Charles (John Heard), is bonded. The other half has gone back to her husband. She is Laura (Mary Beth Hurt), a pretty and appealing but not very confident young woman who regards herself as quite ordinary. To the love-sotted Charles she is Cleopatra, and that is part of the problem. Each of them is unstrung, he by the crazy intensity of his love, she by his insistence that she is a marvel among women.

The two had lived together for a couple of months before Laura took fright and moved out. That was a year ago, but Charles is still zonked. The phone rings and... no; it is only his mother (Gloria Grahame), a withered vamp whose insulation has started to fray, and who flirts coyly with suicide whenever she feels that not enough attention is being paid to her, calling to say that she has taken sleeping pills again and is sinking in the bath water. No matter. The logic of Charles' obsession tells him that the next call will be from Laura, who will say to him that the sky is blue and birds are singing.

His friends think he is nuts, and they are right. He spends hours, late at night, parked in front of the house where Laura lives with her stepdaughter and the hus band to whom she is nothing special.

Charles builds a model of the house, furnishes it and plays moodily with a Laura doll, a husband doll, a daughter. In the state government office where he works (the state happens to be Utah, though not much is made of the fact, and the film's lo cation could just as easily have been Penn sylvania), he shoves papers into his Out box without reading them and swigs vod ka from a pint in his desk drawer. Laura does not call.

All around Charles are mocking examples of true love's dreary results.

Though he has given her no encouragement whatsoever, his own secretary is pathetically in love with him. His stepfather Pete, a fat Babbitt, has a whining neurotic on his hands in Charles' awful mother. His sister is happily in love but cannot see that her health-nut boyfriend is an ass. His jobless roommate Sam, on the other hand, is not in love, has all of the girls and sex he wants, and seems both clearheaded and blissful.

Actor Heard, who has a gift for portraying troubled and somewhat enigmatic young men, plays Charles lightly, but with an edge of lunacy. The film's statement, that love is madness, seems only partly comic; and it is an open question during most of Head over Heels whether this madness is a desirable condition. Di rector Joan Micklin Silver lets the action and Heard's characterization veer close to the actual, unfunny sort of in sanity. Once or twice before the happy ending, it seems that something gruesome may be in the air. The quark, or question mark, involves this dark chanciness that finally proves to have foreshadowed nothing. It is intentional, of course, but a trifle heavyhanded; the viewer wants to laugh more loudly than the director permits.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.