38. One From The Heart; movie review

 

ONE FROM THE HEART

Cert 12A

94 mins

BBFC advice: Contains  infrequent strong language, moderate sex references, nudity, domestic abuse

The name Francis Ford Coppola is synonymous with The Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now and the likes of Peggy Sue Got Married and The Cotton Club, among many more.

It is easy to forget the black cloud which gathered on his career after the disaster of One From The Heart.

This musical fantasy gathered sales of only just over $600,000 against a $26m budget, forcing him to sell his Zoetrope Studio and spend the rest of the 1980s paying off his debts.

Fortunately, the movie is being re-released this year, satisfying my need to see what went wrong.

The verdict is that it will have been too experimental for most tastes, but I enjoyed its eccentricities.

One From The Heart stars Teri Garr and Coppola favourite Frederic Forrest as a Las Vegas couple together for exactly five years.

In their first scenes, she gives him a holiday to a Pacific island, and he reciprocates with the deeds to their rented house as presents to mark the occasion.

But within the gifts lies their issue - she is an adventurer who wants to experience the world while he wants to put down roots and create a comfortable life together.

Thus, it occurs to her that he isn't offering her the future she wants, so she says she is leaving.

So, she goes out to sew wild oats with a playful piano player (Raul Julia) while he doesn't do too badly by finding solace in the arms of a dancer (Nastassja Kinski).

The storyline is mundane, but One From The Heart stands out with its wildly colourful sets and a jazzy soundtrack by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle.

Also, the set pieces are genuinely startling (a stocking-and-suspender-clad Kinski walking the tightrope is a highlight.

Amid the craziness, the dialogue is often strange and stilted, but the overall movie is interesting and, with hindsight, didn't deserve to be such a colossal flop.

Reasons to watch: A Coppola movie

Reasons to avoid: Patchy delivery

Laughs: Two

Jumps: None

Vomit: None

Nudity: Yes

Overall rating: 7/10

Did you know? Rather than film on location, a replica of Las Vegas' McCarran Airport, complete with a jetway and jet airliner (built from the nose section of a crashed plane), was built on the studio lot and used for the penultimate scene.

The final word. Francis Ford Coppola: "The film was shown to exhibitors -- what they call a blind bidding screening -- and it was still a mess, months before completion. I even recorded an intro explaining that it was really a work in progress. However, it got reviewed anyway -- badly -- and the downward spiral began. No one really wanted a filmmaker who controlled a studio, so there were a lot of forces looking for us to fail." The Digital Bits

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