Slo-Mo Farce

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SITTING DUCKS

Directed and Written by Henry Jaglom

Sitting Ducks starts out as a routine comic caper in which a pair of incompetent criminals (Zack Norman and Michael Emil) make off with the day's take of the Mob's New York gambling operations and make their way toward Miami and a rendezvous with a seaplane that is supposed to take them to a haven in Costa Rica. Indeed, the first glimpses of this enterprise are inordinately depressing: the shooting and editing are tacky, and the dialogue meanders witlessly from one half-improvised notion to another.

But it turns out that Writer-Director Jaglom, whose previous work can charitably be described as excruciating, really isn't much interested in the criminal life. What's on his mind is the way fantasy interferes with and distorts perceptions of reality. Having picked up a chauffeur (Richard Romanus) who is obsessed with writing "the Great American Song," the criminals soon add two ladies to their entourage. One, sweetly played by Patrice Townsend, is a yoga adept, a diet freak and, it develops, something of a nymphomaniac who brings a musical Teddy bear to bed with her as she seduces all the males present. Her friend, well played by Irene Forrest, is the opposite: a woman so noisily trying to find herself that she is bound to lose herself in the confusion. Given the fact that one of the crooks is a parody of machismo while the other is an arrested adolescent, a good deal of rather funny dialogue about sex ensues, as does a fair amount of partner switching. It's as if a lot of slightly stoned characters had set out to make an old-fashioned bedroom farce, couldn't manage the frantic pace those works conventionally demand, and then settled for doing their own laid-back thing. The result is a literally offbeat movie that manages to capture the way people who have read one too many (or one too few) paperback sex guides really are talking about -- and conducting -- the battle of the sexes.

-- Richard Schickel

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