Old Boyfriends (1978)

 Old Boyfriends (1978)

Directed by Joan Tewkesbury
Written by Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader

Dianne is an LA psychologist going through a difficult time. She is retracing her past, driving around the country in her car. She is hunting down old boyfriends, relationships that didn’t work out from years back, even back to junior high school.

The movie has a very good cast of men supporting the nuanced central performance by Talia Shire as Dianne.

What is Dianne after? Is it revenge? It seems to be in the first two reconnecting encounters. First in Colorado with Jeff, Richard Jordan, who she seduces and immediately abandons without a trace. Then in Chicago with Eric, John Belushi, her high school boyfriend. She takes Eric to the old teen parking makeout place where they were as kids and restages a scene that hurt her. This time, in control, it comes out differently.

Things begin to shift for her when she meets up with Wayne played by Keith Carradine. She goes back to the town where she lived in her early years and goes to the home of her old junior high boyfriend there. Here she meets Wayne, the younger brother of the old boyfriend who was killed some years ago in Vietnam. Wayne has been wounded by the loss of his brother who he idolized and looked up to.

Their interaction brings about a shift in Dianne and the path to the resolution of this small but appealingly personal dramatic movie.

There was a scene looking out the window in the neighborhood where she meets Wayne. Something about that shot evoked another small movie set somewhere in the USA in John Huston’s Wise Blood.
There is a tone in movies like this, to quote the great lyrics to The House I Live in by Abel Meeropol, “That’s America to me.”

Ray Meets Helen (2018) By Alan Rudolph

I watched this new movie. Not out at the movie theater. I haven’t been to a movie theater in awhile. I watched it at home as a streaming rental from one of those big companies that sell that kind of stuff.

The movie is about a couple of old people down on their luck. Well, they just don’t have money which is part of the same thing. And Ray, played by Keith Carradine, is worse off than that because he has some kind of looming health crisis.

Anyway, they both come by some money separately and unbelievably. Then they meet up in a fancy/snobbish restaurant

Ray Meets Helen was written and directed by Alan Rudolph. We had watched a couple others of his movies lately including the great Choose Me with Keith Carradine again except it was made 40 years ago when he was a handsome young man and not the old guy he is and plays as Ray.
Movies are funny that way. Now with access to a lot of older movies practically instantly, one can watch someone go from young to old, well, to almost dead with a few clicks within the same hour.

This gives me the impression that life just zips by, that we are all young and old and here and gone at the same time and linier time is totally an illusion.

At any rate in this movie Carradine is old and so is Sandra Locke who plays Helen and so is Alan Rudolph who got all this together.

But one thing remains the same. That is that Alan Rudolph makes very amusing and thought provoking movies about the randomness of love/sex relationship. Because in a way, this movie is not at all remote from Choose Me.

I buy into this actually. These things are random here in the modern timeless USA. They have certainly been random in my life. My viewing companion and me as an example. I just saw her photo of Facebook one day maybe 6 years ago and throught, “Wow! I want THAT one.”

And here we are moments/years/instantly now/later. Just like in the movie when Ray approaches Helen in the restaurant.

Funny how things work that way.

Delightful how Alan Rudolph sees that and shows it to us in his hyper-realistic believable/unbelievable entertainments. He totally gets it. My kind of filmmaker for sure.