16 NOVEMBER 1997

CINEMA

MATTHEW SWEET

If GI Jane's protagonists are featureless blanks, then the theatrical family assembled by Henry Jaglom in Last Summer in the Hamptons seems almost surfeited with detail. This is partly due to Jaglom and Victoria Foyt's intelligent, ceaselessly talkative script, and partly because they have requisitioned great chunks of their actors' biographies in its assembly. The matriarchal Helena, for instance, is a grand old Swedish actor who once starred in Hollywood opposite Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan. She's played by the late Viveca Lindfors, a grand old Swedish actor who, well, you know the rest. We even see her watching TV reruns of her back catalogue, recounting memories that are presumably her own.

Jaglom sends up theatrical pretensions and insecurities with a cruel relish: playwright Jake (played by Jon Robin Baitz) dodges actors' excessive compliments and career-minded sexual favours; New York director Eli (Ron Rifkin) clips his nasal hair with neurotic diligence; movie-star Oona (co-screenwriter Foyt) is so nervy that she has to do animal improvisations before meeting new people (we see her flapping about on her bedroom floor as a baby seal - a civilian one this time). But to prevent these observations on the relationships between acting and sincerity from becoming too unkind, Jaglom bathes his film in nostalgia - this is the family's final summer in their Long Island home, and a production of The Cherry Orchard is being staged in the garden. There are dozens of allusions to Chekhov throughout the plot and dialogue, and Jaglom's rough, unfussy direction owes something to Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street. It's an attractive and deceptively modest work from a director who knows what actors and acting are for. And, like a good production of Chekhov, it lends its bourgeois self-absorption a compelling intensity and warmth.