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Dating the Enemy
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It
is a strange thing: in my experience, every second filmmaker and screenwriter
in Australia loves the old Hollywood romantic and screwball comedies, and they
all want to make an old-fashioned, good-hearted romantic comedy, some with a
modern 1990s relationship twist. But, although it may not be fair to say,
romantic comedy is a genre of which Australian movies often fall foul. So, I
admit, I was a bit trepedatious approaching Dating
the Enemy. Another contemporary example of this mode of Australian film is Love and Other Catastrophes (Emma-Kate
Croghan, 1996), but I cannot say anything more about that one, particularly as
I am in it (playing what Margaret Pomeranz kindly described as a “film studies
hero”). What I can say is that romantic comedy – particularly in that sunny,
grand old, Hollywood tradition – is, these days, incredibly hard to do well.
Dating the Enemy sits astride two traditions of popular cinema. It has one
foot in the old romantic comedy tradition, and the other in a more recent
stream of fluffy, supernatural comedies. A mid-1980s craze, supernatural
comedies are about time-travel, identity swapping, or characters suddenly
growing older or younger. It produced films including Peggy Sue Got Married (Francis Ford Coppola, 1986), Vice Versa (Brian Gilbert, 1984) and Big (Penny Marshall, 1988). One of the
last films in that fashionable cycle – a film from which Dating the Enemy, it seems to me, borrows heavily – is Blake
Edwards’ Switch (1991). That is about
Steve (Perry King), a guy gleefully murdered by a cabal of lovers to whom he
was unfaithful. At the point of death, this macho womaniser is instantly
reincarnated in the female form of Ellen Barkin; he becomes a misogynist male “trapped
in the body of a blonde”, as the French release title for the film described
his situation.
Unlike Switch, Dating the Enemy doubles the identity swap premise. The story
follows a troubled young couple, Tash (Claudia Karvan) and Brett (Guy Pearce)
who, as the script keeps emphatically telling the viewer, have absolutely
nothing in common. She is a smart newspaper journalist, an uptight careerist;
he is a budding TV personality, superficial and narcissistic. She wants
commitment, he doesn’t; like the hero of Switch,
Brett is a bit of a cad or sleazeball, and he has very little understanding of
a woman’s needs. “If only you could see yourself through my eyes!”, cries Tash
as they’re breaking up, and that is the mystical cue for a typical supernatural
movie switch.
One
night, under a full moon, while they are both asleep in their separate
apartments, their bodies go all wavery and heavenly, and hey presto, they swap
bodies. Let’s be clear about this premise: Tash and Brett still have their own
minds, their own personalities, but are suddenly inside their partner’s body.
In practical film terms, this means, for instance, that when Claudia Karvan is
in the shot with her mouth shut, Guy Pearce’s voice is thinking away furiously
in her head. Got that?
The comparison between this film and Switch can be detected in an unkind reference to Edwards in the Dating the Enemy press kit. Director Megan Simpson Huberman comments on her approach to her story: “It’s not a film full of jokes about men not being able to walk in women’s high heels”. While there were, indeed, a few too many burlesque high heel jokes in Switch, it had also had real substance – an intriguing mix of possibilities raised, explored and sometimes evaded. I have explored these aspects of Switch in my 1994 book Phantasms, and in expanded form here.
The
possibilities I am alluding to are in line with Brett’s observation in Dating the Enemy when he says that, to
inhabit the body of the opposite sex, to experience life that way for a day – to
feel and know that difference – is, in a sense, the ultimate fantasy. More
specifically, Brett is talking about finding out what sex is like from inside
the body of the opposite gender; he calls that the “ultimate hidden secret”!
Yet,
with Dating the Enemy, as with Switch, we hit a major problem at the
starting gate of this admirable fantasy scenario – a truly philosophical
problem. There has yet to be the ultimate movie – mainstream or otherwise – about
gender swapping/switching. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get very far when
one begins with the idea of a male personality inside a female body, and vice
versa; philosophically speaking, it is a mind/body split. And a crippling split
for a film trying to make a wild comedy about sex, gender and relationships.
How
can you have a male mind, a male personality, that stays pre-formed, intact,
when it is suddenly experiencing a radically new set of physical sensations,
trace memory, and so on? This is very opposite of what theorists call the lived embodiment of gender! Early on, Dating with the Enemy is a little
disappointing, even distressing in this regard. Like Steve in Switch, Brett starts off feeling his own
new female breasts and admiring his own, new female ass. Meanwhile, Tash starts
squealing in embarrassment and disgust when she experiences her first male
erection in front of some glossy piece of art-world erotica.
While
Tash complains about “men’s hormones”, it seems that hormones have been displaced
in the split between mind and body: her mind, obviously, is not affected by his
hormones; while Brett’s mind still seems to be carrying his hormones around. A
really good, smart comedy would have tried to logically think and work through
some of these mind-boggling (not to mention body-boggling) concepts.
To
be fair, neither Dating the Enemy nor Switch stay with these initial
divisions between male/female and mind/body. Both films try to move toward some
other space – usually, some rapprochement or mutual understanding between the
previously divided sexes. When I see a film about gender swapping, I mentally make
an advance list of topics that I want to see included: Will the man in a
woman’s body menstruate? Will masturbation figure as an event of
self-discovery? Will there be some gay or bisexual complication, with a woman
in a man’s body suddenly finding herself attracted to another woman, for
instance (and likewise for the male switch)? Will there be certain social
experiences of gender raised – like the sexual harassment of women on the
streets or in the workplace; or the homo-social rituals of male bonding through
sport, drinking and whatnot? Will there be much made of the different social
manners of men and women, the different ways they talk, inhabit space, and have
access (or not) to certain privileges and powers? And, the most fundamental
question of all: will the man in a woman’s body, and the woman in a man’s body,
have sex together – and if so, what will it be like for them?
To
its great credit, Dating the Enemy has a stab at just about everything on that list. The guy experiences
menstruation; the woman experiences shaving (although I have never bought the
popular equation that somehow presents these acts as equivalent gender
experiences!). There are some cute moments about the difference between wallets
and purses, and other comedy-of-manners stuff, though this is a pretty slim
element. There are plenty of body gags in the film – about how men and women
move differently, for instance – although the spectacle of Pearce’s girly
mincing tires next to Karvan’s more convincing macho swagger. And there is some
rousing material about the different workspace politics as they are encountered
by men and by women. But what of the sexual matters?
There
is no masturbation. The gay and bisexual possibilities are politely, but
firmly, skipped right over. And there is a section where both our main
characters, off on separate, casual adventures, get drunk enough to find out a
few things about what sex is like in their partner’s body. Without disclosing
anything central, and even though the film is forever a bit coy, I will say
that I was pleasantly surprised at where the plot dares to go from there. And
that is the thrill and the fun of Dating
the Enemy, which, overthrowing my trepidation, turned out to be more genuinely
entertaining than I expected.
In
the end, Dating the Enemy does not
become a raunchy sex-and-gender comedy film. Rather, what it wants to be is a
sweet, slightly old-fashioned, affirmative tale about love and romance. Like Love and Other Catastrophes, Only You (Norman Jewison, 1994) and When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989), Dating the Enemy passes through the
veils, complications and confusions of modern life to arrive at some dream that
people who are destined to be together forever will indeed find each other,
that love at first sight is real, and that opposites attract.
In
romantic comedies, this dream is usually manifested or materialised in the last,
breathless moments of the story, dissolved just before the dream has to be
tested against time, appetite or the hard work of intimacy. The little trick of
this genre – and it happens all the way from Ernst Lubitsch’s masterpieces of
the 1930s right up to the latest nostalgia efforts – sees the fated lovers come
together in the final shot, often somewhere ordinary out on the street and, as
the camera cranes and the music soars, they exchange some words that they have
spoken to each other once before, usually at the very start of their
relationship.
They
might be quite banal words, but now the lovers speak them knowingly,
ironically. In speaking like this, in quotation marks, they mark the distance
they have traveled in order to re-find one another. But they also inscribe a
charmed, magic circle around each other and their story of love – while their
words, looping back, seem to have the effect of obliterating the march of time.
At the movies, this is a dream that appears hard to beat.
© Adrian Martin September 1996 |
