LIBERATION-PARIS, FRANCE

After having frankly been bored by Paul Cox's latest movie and having had our brain and senses violated by Peter Greenaway (as well as two Soviets named Adomenajte and Gorlove), it was with gratitude that we found ourselves at the end of the evening, warming up our hearts to the intimate fires of Henry Jaglom.

There was no surprise in this: He continues what he started with "Can She Bake A Cherry Pie?" and the films that followed ("Always," etc.) Jaglom has a very engaging way of using his cinema as personal therapy and making self-contemplation astonishingly attractive. Dealing with his sadness seems to have opened him up to others AND HE IS BUILDING UP A BODY OF WORK (AN OEUVRE) WHICH, when it is viewed overall, may well turn out to be for real, what Woody Allen is supposed to have done so well for years! Jaglom is much more true and much funnier, even though he always keeps us a bit covered by a sentimental blanket. From this point of view some call him a "minor filmmaker." IN ACTUALITY HIS CINEMA-OPEN, FLUID AND PRECISE-BECOMES MORE AND MORE PRECIOUS TO US AT A TIME WHEN MOST FILMS ARE AS TRENDY AND PRETENTIOUS AS THEY HAVE BECOME IN RECENT YEARS.

A cocoon-like day such as the American New Year's Day is the perfect thing for the genre of emotionally affecting voyeurism that Jaglom so shamelessly practices. It should be a film about pulling up roots (or reestablishing roots, as Jaglom is a former New Yorker), but very quickly Henry takes us back with feeling under his blanket. He is supposed to be moving in on that day, freezing, sick and jet-lagged. He finds his new apartment still occupied: Three young women representing a typical New York cross-section. Among them is a very beautiful "Jewish Princess" a la Laura Nyro, (Maggie Jakobson), who finds herself more at ease with dolphins and chimpanzees than with men (she does the voices for TV cartoon characters), and she is burdened with an unfaithful boyfriend, an abusive mother and a father who is a retired TV sitcom writer (who would like to return to do TV again at the current salaries so he can make enough money never to do TV again). There is also Gwen Welles as a compulsively verbal lesbian; and Milos Forman as the building's superintendent, whom the three girls use as a Teddy Bear (with cigar). Jaglom observes all these socio-emotional goings-on with a clear eye-that of the "older man." He finds himself on the threshold of a new life, which in fact he is already living but which he hasn't started yet in the film. It is this essential distance in the time which save's Jaglom's films from turning into hysterical psychodramas, a distance that he compares to the one that exists between ourselves and the stars. What he allows us to see now is what is already past for him and maybe what he would have wished to have happened. "IT ALL DEPENDS WHAT STAR YOU'RE STANDING ON."

-Philippe Garnier