Zandalee

ZANDALEE (1990)

Sadly, there seems to be one sure way to be hailed a "bold" actress capable of giving a "mesmerizing" and "fiercely interesting" performance. These are the sorts of statements that I read about Kristin Scott Thomas's performance in The English Patient. I had already been a general admirer of her by catching her twin Hugh Grant movies, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bitter Moon with Polanski. She seemed to have a very nice way with understatement, capable of saying words and silently conveying the subtext behind them with a sort of fraughtful look. So I was curious as to what the huge leap was that had caused all this commotion among the film critics.

Of course, Kristin Scott Thomas had caught the attention of critics the same way that Julianne Moore did in Short Cuts, that Jane March did in the Lover, and Sharon Stone did in Basic Instinct: essentially, she said some lines while showing her pubic hair. This sort of thing tends to make for a good review on the part of the mostly male film critics.

All for nothing, nothing for all Consider, then, the poor case of Erika Anderson in the title role of Zandalee, who is willing to prove herself a "bold" and "interesting" actress in the very first minute and a half of the film, during which she playfully twirls around nude. Through the movie, Anderson dances nude, drunkenly talks dirty, gets her breasts and stomach painted blue, has drugs inserted up her wa-wa, gets cornholed in a confessional (the cornholing being a major source of debate among me and my friends watching it, since it wasn't spelled out definitively as cornholing and some of us thought that it was just doggy-style sex in a confessional and we all basically missed three to five minutes of the movie arguing over it), and copulates on floor, canvas, studio mattress and washing machine. For some reasons critics never really noticed this movie and as far as I know, almost no one has seen Zandalee, except for those souls horny enough to stay up late and catch it on a cable channel. And so Ms. Anderson, who really does cry convincingly on cue and deliver her lines with believability (although without much apparent talent), will never get a chance to sell out real big, e.g., Julianne Moore in Assassins and the Lost World and what not.

The reason almost no one saw Zandalee is that it has Judge Reinhold and Nicholas Cage in it as romantic leads. Reinhold plays Anderson's husband who is tormented and locked up over his position in life (he used to write and teach poetry, now he's inherited his father's company which is in the process of being bought out), Cage plays Reinhold's young chum, who has stayed true to his artistic path, and lives in the sleazy part of town and paints and does drugs and has sex with strippers, etc., etc. Reinhold encounters Cage at a bacheleor part after having not seen him for many years, hires him at the company, drags him back and introduces him to Anderson. Anderson, of course, takes an intense dislike to Cage and I say "of course" not just because it's a movie cliche, but because Cage's character is a genuine arrogant asshole, slagging his old friend for selling out, hitting on the wife and treating almost everything everyone says with open contempt. Later, of course, we find out that Cage's character is addicted to coke and is short on money and is incapable of keeping it in his pants. This is in Cage's "do anything to be interesting" phase so his hair is long and greasy, he wears some sort of goatee, and half the time he is wearing some sort of horn-rimmed glasses that in tandem with his schnoz and the top part of the goatee give the impression that he's wearing one of those Groucho disguises. Reinhold by contrast, has a mustache and hair that obviously wasn't responding well to the humidity (the movie is set in New Orleans which may be another reason why the movie didn't do well since all movies set in New Orleans, with the exception of the Big Easy and I guess Streetcar Named Desire, have been notoriously disappointing box-office wise as far as I know. Even the bigger budgeted ones like Interview with the Vampire and Hard Target never really caught on fire with the public the way their distributors hoped which in a way is kind of a shame since if there's anywhere that would actually justify the b-movie cliche of two people meeting to talk at a strip bar, it would be New Orleans) so that it feathers up and out showcasing Mr. Reinhold's rather substantial ears. Judge Reinhold actually has done some good work in bad movies (his performance in Beverly Hills Cop II is absolutely the only good thing in the movie) and some lackluster work in good movies (his performance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High comes to mind and the first BHC, if you can really call that a good movie), but here he is doing bad work in a bad movie. His accent is bad (a New Orleans accent delivered apparently by putting a very small marble under his tongue) his line readings are bad (most of the poorly written earnest lines he plays off by rolling his eyes in his head as if he can't believe he's saying them), and seems somehow unsympathetic somehow. I believe you can have an engrossing romantic triangle between three unlikable people if the people are complex enough, but here the people are unlikable simpletons which really makes the whole movie rough going.

It's hard to tell, considering the number of scenes where people actually have their clothes on talking about stuff, if this movie was somehow meant to be a meaningful look at how three different people wrestle with their problems through having (or denying themselves of) sex, or if all that is just stuff to keep the actors and European audiences feeling sophisticated during the times when Ms. Anderson isn't peeling down, but because all of the scenes are so poorly written and tend to jump around from simplistic topic to simplistic topic (integrity v. responsibility, tradition v. freedom, unenjoyable sex with someone you love v. enjoyable passionate drugs-up-the-wa-wa-and-getting-cornholed-or-possibly-doggy-styled-in-a-confessional sex with someone who acts like a jerk and needs a bath and looks half-the-time like he's wearing a dopey Groucho disguise and is going to whip it off at any minute and actually turn out to be a Baldwin brother or something), I tend to favor the stuff theory. I saw the unrated version which, although somewhat spicey (I myself was sort of partial to the washing machine scene despite it being intercut with scenes of Reinhold looking like his ears are about to start flapping and lifting him into the air), is still far from being the sort of eyebrow raising stuff of Blue Velvet or your average porn movie.

There are reasons to watch Zandalee, however, few though they may be. Steve Buscemi has a small role as a fun-loving petty-criminal garbage man, Joe Pantoliano who was absolutely astounding in Bound is somewhat charming here as that late 80's, early 90's cliche, the heroine's gay best friend and Marisa Tomei an even smaller one as Nicholas Cage's guest at a dinner party. New Orleans looks might purty, and the soundtrack by Pray for Rain is kind of buoyant and light and fun at the opening and the ending which, considering that the movie ends in that classic "we'll have almost everyone die to show that it's a serious movie and not just a piece of lightweight sex-positive erotic" way that makes one feel if not emotionally moved then at least slightly guilty for watching with the desire to have a good time, is probably not the best choice for opening and closing music but since I can still remember the tune but not the names of any characters not in the title was probably wise on somebody's part.

Steve Buscemi's still getting work. Marisa Tomei won an Oscar, got some work, now who knows. Nicholas Cage won an Oscar, is still getting work. Judge Reinhold got some more work, then some more, I think I saw him in a commercial or something, he'll probably get a sitcom or something, who knows. But as for Erika Anderson, I never saw her again. She's listed on the video box as being in Twin Peaks, which was news to me (maybe she was that man-killing paegant queen), but nothing other than that. I wonder if she's doing the direct-to-cable/video erotic thriller circuit, or she's doing local theater now, or she's married to some real estate guy back in her home town or if she makes big money doing commercials overseas, or if she's still going to auditions, living off her dwindling savings and the occasional dinky resid. check and telling everyone about how she missed getting the role for Basic Instinct by this much or what. I kinda want to know, considering she really did seem to give it her all and I can't help but think of all the potentially humiliating things she had to do, be they peel down naked, gasp orgasmically or just say reverentially the lousy poetry that Reinhold's character was supposed to have written "back when he was good" and I think the internal drama she had to deal with before each and every take of each and every lousy exploitive thing must have been a hundred times stronger than anything anyone will ever find in Zandalee.

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