Intersection

I can remember nothing other than the car crash that so effectively bookends Claude Sautet’s 1969  film, Les Choses de la Vie but apparently I thought highly of it. Mark Rydell’s remake gives no cause for such enthusiasm, reducing what was evidently a telling reflection on a man’s life into an over-produced  but terminally uninspired  romance. 

Richard Gere plays a successful architect, Vincent Eastman, torn between his estranged wife Sally (Sharon Stone) with whom he has a 13 year-old daughter, and journalist Olivia (Lolita Davidovich), with whom he is a about to start a new life.

As with the Sautet original, the film starts with a car crash and then we get the back-story of Vincent’s existential crisis told in flashback.  Of the many things wrong with this film, the script by veterans  Marshal Brickman and David Rayfiel is at its heart.  It’s deadly dull in its formulaic trotting out of Vincent’s troubles  which to say that they don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world is an understatement. Then, with so little at stake the performances hardly get off the ground.  Gere does his familiar boyish charm routine, wrinkling his eyes to suggest a wryly sensitive sensibility (ohl how the ladies in the audience will want to save him from his dilemma) in the many close-ups Rydell gives him but he is more passionate about some architectural detail than he is about either of the women in his life.  Davidovich, who isn’t so well flattered by close-ups, isn’t remotely convincing as a journalist or for that matter playing Dionysus to Stone's Apollo.  And if the latter adds a bit of class to proceedings, when she plays giggling bride-to-be, she’s awful. 

Then there’s Rydell’s direction which fails to move out of first gear and gradually winds down to telemovie standards of unsubtlety by the closing stages. There’s a neat  twist at the end that I suspect may not have been in the original film but it has as much emotional heft as the reading of some committee minutes.  And, as if tilting for A-list attention, the whole thing is expensively packaged with a glossy production design and saddled with an early 90s taste for baggy wardrobe and shaggy hair on men.

With so many elements so very wrong Intersection might serve as an object lesson in how not to make movie.

 

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