domingo, 23 de agosto de 2009

WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN




I have had the opportunity to see this movie in the television in several occasions. Directed by the Mexican Luis Mandoki in 1994 it led then a great success in ticket office; but as the time passes, every time this film disillusions me more and I like ith less. And it in spite of having been in preparation there being based on one notes written by the very same Orson Wells and of beginning with the beautiful panoramic one of Frisco´s Bay, with the involvidable Percy Sledge's topic that gives its title degree to the tape as soundtrack.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQh112HQsoE



We are present at the history of love led by the Green´s marriage: Alice (Meg Ryan) and Michael (Andy GarcĂ­a). From the initial scenes, the director shouws us a protagonist who gets drunk with too many facility, reaching this happy and enterteining point. We admit that the comparisons are odious, but they turn out to be inevitable. The interpretation of alcoholic wife opened by Meg Ryan in this film takes me fancy certainly insufficiently on having compared it with the veracity and the dramatic quality wasted by Lee Remick as the role of Kirsten Arnesen in " Days of wine and roses " (Blake Edwards, 1962).




At present, the descriptive model based on the different kinds of the alcoholic disease has been overcome. But in a graphical simple way we might fit Alice's case as the representative one of the so called housewife´s alcoholism. In his genesis and maintenance diverse elements take part: loneliness, shame, frustration, depression, autopity and fall autoestimates... In certain moments, she manages to reproach her husband, a comercial pilot, his long absences out of the familiar home. The initial concealment of the habit is here also present, since the patient hides the bottles for the drawers of the cupboards far from the looks of her own family.


In these situations the classic one turns out to be already the reference to the vodka as the choice´s drink, since supposedly his ingestion does not leave tracks of ethyl breath. Anyhow an uncertain information, an urban legend...




The whirlpool of drunkenness in that little by little Alice is submerging leads that the couple takes a drastic decision: she´ll have to join an institution specializing in the alcoholic detoxification. The temporary separation between Alice and Michael and the feeling displacement that this one feels when he visits his wife they brought to my memory the personal frustration suffered by the personage of Grant Anderson (Gordon Pinsent) in "Away from her" (Sarah Polley , 2006) when oneself sees obliged to deposit his wife in a residence for patients with dementia.

This film is revalued precisely because emphisizes in the domestic consequences provoked by the alcoholic disease. And not only during the weeks that Alice remains entered, but also later, when she tries to join again the daily homeloving life. Specially Tina Majorino's interpretation (Jessica), and the one of the prolific Mae Whytman (Casey) in the role of the small daughters of the Green´s, they help to heighten the veracity of the argument. Girls at these time, nowadays pretty twentyish. Tempus fugit...

In almost all the North American movies that treat the problem of the alcoholism, Alcoholic Anonymous it´s always present, on having treated itself about a brotherhood very powerful and extended both in the USA and aslo in Canada and Mexico. In this movie there exists a reference to Al-Anon, the association of support formed by the relatives of the alcoholic ones who also re-join from time to time.

We emphasize also the modest participation in this tape of a great actress (Ellen Burstyn) and of a serious actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman) whose good respective one to do artistically surelly soon will be commented in this same blog: "Requiem for a dream" (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) and "The Savages" (Tamara Jenkins, 2007).

To finish these ramblings, a last note melomaniac. An intimista version of "My Funny Valentine" adorns the scene in which the equal protagonist dances celebrating their 4th weeding´s anniversary. This musical piece nowadays turned into a standard of the jazz, originally it was composed by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for the musical one "Babes in arms" (1937).


No doubt, my favorite version is the Chet Baker's sentimentally heart-breaking one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvXywhJpOKs

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