A step back in time from Eureka (1983) along the Nicolas Roeg and Theresa Russell line. Tom Waits opens things with An Invitation to the Blues (from Small Change (1976)). Yale Udoff wrote a very dodgy screenplay. For reasons unknown Art Garfunkel got the lead role.
Somehow Garfunkel is a "research psychoanalyst" in present-day Vienna. But before we meet him we have a quite good scene where (much older) Denholm Elliott drops Russell off on a bridge between Austria and Czechoslovakia for reasons unknown. She keeps the car and her wedding band and is soon-enough looking for another (much older) man-shaped toy. The recounting of the story is temporally confused: she seems to have overdosed on something and Garfunkel is trying hard to dissociate himself from whatever happened. Harvey Keitel struts as a local detective in a sort-of mullet, suspicious of what we're not really sure until we get close to the debauched ending.
So many scenes repeat: Russell's character is no more than anybody and everybody's manic pixie dream dipso party-girl who seems to be looking for a solid father figure. (This is a bit strange as we're told her actual father is still around in California and she misses her departed mother.) Garfunkel is cardboard and makes it abundantly (repeatedly) clear that he's in it for her body. He gets madly jealous whenever that body is not within reach or accounted for. Perhaps they both enjoy the screaming matches and animalistic coupling.
Roeg missed a trick by not casting Paul Simon as Garfunkel's Czech competitor, the man who got there first. Things are so cut up that I struggled to understand what happened when (though it never matters) but perhaps most perplexing is the masala of spoken German, French, English and Czech, along with some sort of spycraft that goes nowhere. Russell has a new outfit and hairdo in every scene but never gets an opportunity to develop her character. So much smoking. The camerawork is very pervy.
Roger Ebert: one-and-a-half stars. Janet Maslin.
