Thursday, January 27, 2022

Love & Money (James Toback, 1982)

 

It’s regrettable that James Toback’s behavioural excesses may now be more widely known than his films, but given how his best work is seeped in a compulsive-seeming rush of sex and power and appetite, it also makes a certain displaced kind of sense. The enjoyably eccentric Love and Money is one of his more ambitious projects, given that the plot encompasses global commodities markets and potential revolution in a South American country, but hardly has an epic feel about it, the prevailing tone driven much more by personal obsession. Ray Sharkey plays Byron Levin, a dissatisfied bank employee living with his book dealer girlfriend and no-longer-tuned-in grandfather (King Vidor!), approached by Stockheinz, a wealthy businessman (Klaus Kinski!), to help persuade his best friend from years back not to nationalize his country’s silver business (the best friend, naturally, is now the country’s President), all of which occupies Byron less than his instant desire for Stockheinz’s wife (Ornella Muti). For much of the time, there’s a sense that things could veer in one direction as easily as another, with little explanation required (as embodied in Levin’s hilariously inadequate explanations for his extended absences from home); the movie toys with political sentiments, while its depiction of the fictional country “Costa Salva” is flagrantly thin and unconvincing. The use of Vidor and the recurring motif of the piled-up old books suggests an affinity with classicism, but there’s a restlessness to the movie, a sense of searching for new alchemies in complex times: if not fully achieved, it’s a fascinatingly bumpy journey (although one that ends strangely abruptly, as if Toback’s attention were already moving on to his next and best, Exposed). And you can’t overlook the moment when Byron’s failure to get aroused can only be cured by hearing The Star-Spangled Banner (see, at heart it’s all about American values!)

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