Strapless Movie Review
A few minutes into David Hare's Strapless, I realized that I would be sitting through yet another long, pretentious movie in which a dense guy tries to explain how women feel (sigh). I suspect that some people think that Hare is cute when he tries to be clever, but he's not THAT cute, not with 99 minutes of my time. Blair Brown plays a 40-year-old doctor who goes on and on about how OLD she is. Although we see her in hospital wards, neither Hare's screenplay nor his direction give us an indication of any real emotional investment in her work. She lives with her flaky younger sister, Bridget Fonda. (We know that Bridget is a flake, because she enjoys fashion and parties and sex. Right.) According to the press kit, Blair “meets a mysterious, elegant stranger who is immediately taken with her.” Who else but Bruno Ganz, who looks like he was scraped out of a gutter and sounds like Thug Number Three in an old gangster movie? Faster than you can say “plot device” or “deus ex machina” or whatever, Blair is obligingly writing checks for this slime, draining away her life savings and even marrying him. When Bruno arrives home one night with an expensive car as a gift for her, Blair tells him that she wants to be ordinary, so Bruno disappears into the night. Meanwhile, Bridget is pregnant by a drifter named Carlos and Blair yells at her because she's a slob. You can watch The Hard Way with Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie on the late movie or you can watch Strapless with Blair Brown and Bridget Fonda on video. Strapless will probably put you to sleep faster, especially David Hare's idea of a pièce de résistance: Bridget Fonda designs a line of strapless gowns that are held in place with no visible means of support. And guess what? (nudge-nudge) Women hold their lives in place with no visible means of support EITHER. Give us a BREAK!
1990 (R) 99m/C GB Blair Brown, Bridget Fonda, Bruno Ganz, Alan Howard, Michael Gough, Hugh Laurie, Suzanne Burden, Camille Coduri, Alexandra Pigg, Billy Roch, Gary O'Brien; D: David Hare; W: David Hare; C: Andrew Dunn; M: Nick Bicat. VHS, LV