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Blind Date
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There was a period (1979-1982) when each new Blake
Edwards film was a step bolder and more brilliant than the previous one. The
line stopped at the breathtaking Victor/Victoria (1982), but neither he nor we knew that then. It was the Edwardsian Royal Road:
as well, no single film before or after that peak period is uninteresting, and
many are indeed great. But ’80 to ’82 was a special time to be alive – to be
20! – and to love Blake Edwards. I know, because I was there, lining up at the
cinema with regular folk.
Now, I am fully aware that, even among serious film
people, this is not a particularly widespread or popular taste-position.
Edwards’ career (so we are told) reeks of commercial opportunism, middle-class
ideology, mere “professionalism” (such a dirty word, it seems!). But seek and
you shall find in Edwards something like an apotheosis
of the given: given conventions, assumed and embodied to their fullest, to
the veritable point where they constitute a kind of secretive camouflage. Under
that mask, a performance is taking place – neither subversive nor compliant,
but a third option, another way.
Blind Date is a pretty good
Edwards film. It’s quite impossible to separate his commercial projects from
his personal ones: Blind Date has
none of the therapeutic strain that drives 10 (1980), The Man Who Loved Women (1983), Micki and Maude (1984) and especially the sublime That’s Life! (1986), with their shared
thematic of coming-to-self-knowledge and expanding or redefining our relations
with others. But it sure takes up – above and beyond the armature of theme –
the director’s characteristic exploration of narrative forms and mechanisms.
Here, as often in Edwards, we have a terrific
structure. Set-up for a Catastrophe: an average guy, Walter (Bruce Willis); a
business dinner on tender hooks (as we Aussies like to mis-say); and a woman,
Nadia (Kim Basinger), who – the hero is duly warned – should not be allowed to
drink, and also has (by the by) an angry fiancé (John Larroquette as David) in
hot pursuit.
It all falls apart beautifully, and just keeps getting
worse into the long, dark night. Just before mid-way, the tables turn (she
sobers up while he goes batty) and, accordingly adjusted, we get a fast reprise
of everything that’s already happened. End of night, completion of comic
counter-movement. I wonder if Edwards had the success of Jonathan Demme’s
gloriously twisty Something Wild from the previous
year (1986) in the back of his mind. (Blind
Date, in an earlier form, was originally slated for Madonna and Sean Penn
as co-stars.)
End of the night – but is it the end of the film? On
the next day, Edwards ponders what to do with the pieces of his fiction (scripted
by Dale Launer, who was on a good run from the mid ‘80s to early ‘90s) – just
as the characters wonder what to do with the remains of their lives after this
night that so badly shattered the patterns of their oppressive routines. How can the night be reclaimed?
At this point, Blind
Date unrolls itself anew as a romantic comedy, a little in the vein of It Happened One Night (1934) – complete with a big wedding,
a father (William Daniels as Judge Harold) who hates the wimpy groom-to-be
(i.e., David, his own son), and a final act of liberation. Did I – as the tub-thumping,
normative, mainstream reviewers love to ask – “care about the characters”? Not
terribly much (they don’t actually exist, after all, they’re two-dimensional figures
in a movie) – but I sure admired their respective moves.
Things flow better here for Edwards than in the
previous year’s A Fine Mess (1986).
All his familiar formal parameters are volatised: off-screen space (catch that
dog’s death – the type of gag around which Edwards could and would contrive an
entire plotline, I bet); deep focus frames to populate and play with; long
takes; soundtrack rhubarb. The character-types don’t quite get to spin as they
do in his most profound films and/or his funniest, like The Party (1968); but they are lit up and animated very nicely
indeed by a uniformly good ensemble of actors.
So go on, do your duty: crawl to the cinema where Blind Date is screening and humble
yourself before this supposedly Lesser God of American Cinema. There is so much
to learn here – and so many received opinions to revise.
Note: This review was written in the same period as my general essay “Blake Edwards’ Sad Songs of Love”. I have literally been writing about his films all my adult life, from the age of 17! And this passion has never waned; for more recent expressions of it, hear my audio commentary on the 2017 Olive DVD/Blu-ray of Operation Petticoat, and watch my 2020 audiovisual essay made with Cristina Álvarez López, Impending. MORE Edwards: The Return of the Pink Panther, Son of the Pink Panther, Switch, S.O.B. © Adrian Martin June 1987 |
