Plays Fri-Thurs Jan 16-22 at the Varsity.
The FIrst thing you notice about Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart--before the opening credits, even before the studio moniker--is the size of the screen: 1.37:1, the traditional aspect ratio used by the studios from 1931 to 1953. It is a confining, boxy frame, much more like your TV at home than the screens you are used to seeing in theaters, and its appearance, once the curtains have been drawn, is a fairly startling sight. This is a film from 1982, after all, and released as it was on the troublesome heels of Apocalypse Now--a film that truly necessitated a massive CinemaScope screen--I was shocked that One from the Heart (which is being pimped as a grand romance, and an unfairly maligned grand romance at that, hence its reissue) would occupy such a tiny patch of real estate. How would the beauty of Vittorio Storaro's cinematography be allowed to fully bloom in such tight quarters? How would the film's setting--the city of Las Vegas constructed entirely on indoor sets--achieve its attempted grandeur in such a small, bland square?
The answer to these problems, as it turns out, is that Coppola has packed One from the Heart to near bursting; every frame is drenched with visual tomfoolery, and at times it seems as if the film itself were about to spring from the screen and run loose in the aisles. The look of One from the Heart is a decidedly neat trick--one can easily spy the future extravagance of Coppola's Dracula sneaking about--and the picture is at its best when its characters are given free rein of the city Coppola and his production designer, Dean Tavoularis, have created. The Las Vegas of the picture is suitably gaudy, but there is an intimacy in its construction; building the city under a roof, Coppola has made Vegas not just a setting, but a character as well--a character so well imagined that it quite often shames the film's living and breathing characters right off the stage.
And just who are these living and breathing characters? At the forefront are Franny (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest), a couple who, as the film begins, are about to celebrate five years together. Franny makes window displays for a travel agency, a job that plays perfectly into her daydreams of travel and excitement. Hank, though, lives much closer to the ground, content with the couple's modest home--a home that, to celebrate their anniversary, he has purchased outright from their landlord. It is a heartfelt gift, one that Hank feels fully expresses his love for Franny, but Franny finds it lacking; the cost of the purchase has sapped their savings, and a tropical vacation Franny has scheduled for them--a vacation she had been vigorously anticipating--ends up losing its funding. The result: The couple squabbles and breaks up. The result of this result: Both hit the town in search of separate romantic entanglements.
And so One from the Heart goes, with Franny and Hank first seeking solace from their separate friends (Lainie Kazan for her, Harry Dean Stanton for him), then embarking on respective dates. Franny's escort is a suave singer named Ray (Raul Julia); Hank's rendezvous is with a circus runaway named Leila (Nastassia Kinski). Both suitors are mysterious and exotic--at least to Franny and Hank--a fact that, when coupled with the Las Vegas setting, appears to be at the center of One from the Heart. Franny and Hank are both unable to recognize the merits of their relationship, and their nights out are spent in a dreamy, yet empty, world of music and neon, flirting and sex. Failing to fully appreciate the true beauty in their lives together, the two succumb to flash and glitz, both in the city they inhabit and in the people they find themselves--or tell themselves they find themselves--attracted to. They fall for the fakeness of their surroundings. They also fall for the fakeness of their desires.
As with any romance, questions of whether or not Franny and Hank will realize the blunder of their actions and join together in the end are beside the point; the trajectory of the film is visible from its opening moments, which means all One from the Heart can offer by way of surprises is grace of execution. And unfortunately, Coppola managed to bungle the film's execution--perhaps not as thoroughly as critics claimed in 1982 (when the film was yanked from theaters after a disastrously brief run), but thoroughly enough, for despite being a triumph of production design and photography, the film is finally as vacant as the world it creates. Franny and Hank have no real substance as characters, and as you watch them wander about the dream world Coppola has created, you feel no urgency for them to reunite. In the end, the fact that both turn out to be as false as the city they occupy nullifies the intended paradox between their relationship and their dreams. The entire enterprise has no true heart, and all it really offers are some pretty images, some pretty songs (by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle), and an opportunity to see a film that not only destroyed Coppola's studio, but nearly destroyed his career as well.
