Friday, November 14 1997

Last Summer in the Hamptons and Chasing Amy are a welcome diversion amid a line-up of baffling banality

Henry Jaglom's Last Summer in the Hamptons is an enjoyable exercise in self satire, directed at America's thespian classes.

"A stage is holy," proclaims Eli (Ron Rifkin), a veteran stage actor, in one of the key speeches of Jaglom's film. "It's religious. Acting is the stuff of life. If you can live without it, for God's sake don't do it." He is speaking on behalf of the entire cast of the film, which is set in a house party in East Hampton, the Long Island summer playground of rich aesthetes.

Almost all the people in this film are inhabiting lightly fictionalised versions of themselves. Helena, the imperious hostess, is an ancient Swedish actress who once starred alongside Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan. She is played by Viveca Lindfors, who answered to that description. Among her extended family are Jake, a young playwright, played by Jon Robin Baitz, author of many successful stage pieces, and Nick, a theatre director, played by Kristoffer Tabori, an actor-director who is also the real-life son of Lindfors (and of the great film director Don Siegel, as it happens).

But this is to be the last year of Helena's traditional summer rendezvous, and the final chance for the family and their guests to prepare the customary al fresco production. Naturally, given the Chekhovian ambience, The Cherry Orchard is their choice.

Intramural bonking is the running subtext, and the arrival of a visitor from Hollywood refocuses the ensemble's emotional and sexual energies. Oona Hart, the reluctant star of a comic-book adaptation called Mary Marvel, professes a humble longing to join their world, although her method-acting exercises, in which she takes on the character of a wild animal appropriate to the occasion ("I think I'll give him my baby seal"), bear no resemblance to the inner-directed techniques of Helena's set. But Oona's self-deprecation in the face of her hosts' supposedly higher art is belied by the calculated way in which she sets about seducing those who might be of use to her career.

Hart is played with bony eagerness by Victoria Foyt, Jaglom's wife and co-scenarist. Lindfors, who died in 1995, shortly after the completion of filming, shows us a frosty beauty and an unquenchable ego. André Gregory plays a predatory director. Brooke Smith, Roddy McDowall and Martha Plimpton are among the supporting cast. And, somehow, Jaglom manages to turn a feast of self-referentiality into a witty entertainment.