Choose Me (1984) is made up almost entirely of romantic entanglements. Its numerous subplots, connecting ingeniously, resemble ones you’d find in a breathless daytime soap. In all of them, people are looking for some form of love, validation. But the film’s writer and director, Alan Rudolph, treats the movie a bit like an exercise where soapy conventions are meant to be destabilized. It has an off-centeredness and a distinctive style. The dialogue is unnaturally inflated, like a play where time is extra consumed by incessant chatter. Sometimes you respond in amused disbelief when a character too lucidly talks to a listening companion about an anxiety that’s been eating at them. And the atmosphere recalls film noir or a romantically seedy world Tom Waits might have inhabited — in the guise of one of his many down-and-out creature-of-the-night characters — on one of his early albums. Choose Me also has a deliberate, rather eerie timelessness, in the way other Rudolph movies like 1985’s Trouble in Mind or 1990’s Love at Large do. The cars and some decor are mid-century-appropriate, but other elements, from the sizes and style of hairdos to the way people speak, seem to place it in the present. It makes it harder to find your footing.
Choose Me is soap opera classed up, less moralized — where misery is made lyrical, where characters are prone to bonding over shared loneliness, where you can detect a knowing sense of humor in its maker’s presentation. I wasn’t necessarily moved by it — I was most impressed by its idiosyncratic craftsmanship, the machine-like assuredness of its always-moving plot. But it’s fun to watch, mostly because we want to see where Rudolph is going to take its various narrative complications (will they wind up in knots, or be cleanly unspooled?) and what the uniformly excellent cast members are going to do with these characters, who feel lived-in despite Rudolph’s inclination for talky, emotional over-explanation that should make them feel more artificial, constructed.
Sharing the center of the L.A.-set Choose Me’s Venn diagram of plots are a call-in radio show and a dive bar. On the popular series, a self-styled romance expert — an anonymous Frenchwoman who calls herself Dr. Love (Geneviéve Bujold) — doles out relationship advice to lovelorn callers. And at the bar, the rather inconspicuous Eve’s Lounge, most patrons go in expecting to link up with a sex worker for a night of fun. The pinkish glow of its exterior seems to entice people in. (The movie opens with comers-and-goers slow-dancing happily on the street outside; the mood-perfect title tune, sung by the butter-voiced Teddy Pendergrass, cements the dreamy sensuousness Rudolph establishes in about a minute or so.)
One of Dr. Love’s regular callers is the owner of the bar (Lesley Ann Warren) – coincidentally also named Eve (she inherited it from a woman with the same name who recently killed herself over a bad relationship) — who is deeply dissatisfied. She’s been in a relationship with a Frenchman named Zack (Patrick Bauchau) for the last three and a half years and isn’t hopeful about where it’s going. Eve isn’t sure about getting married — “I’ve ruined too many marriages to have one of my own,” she believes — but she knows she’s craving a nebulous “something more.” Dr. Love, whose real name is Nancy, would be the first to confess outside the show that she’s not the specialist she poses as. New to this job (she started six months ago), she admits that she thinks she’s never been in love, and isn’t assertive about finding it. She balks anytime someone asks her out, and a half a year into her new job her co-workers frustratedly tease her about still being a bit of a mystery to them. (Nancy never wants to do anything outside of work, and she’s dependably cold to anyone who shows interest in so much as getting to know her.)
Warren in Choose Me.
In the meantime, Zack’s much-younger wife, Pearl (Rae Dawn Chong), compulsively hangs out at Eve’s hoping to catch her husband in the act of cheating with the woman who dutifully serves her cocktails; then, a man recently released from a mental hospital, Mickey (Keith Carradine), arrives at the bar and is soon afterward seizing the hearts of all the principal women characters in the movie despite offering tidbits about himself that scan exclusively as quick-and-easy lies. (He kisses Eve after walking her to her car — an act that leads Eve to frame him later on Dr. Love’s show as a quasi-savior figure — and has a one-night stand with Pearl after he shows an interest in her she hasn’t experienced from anybody for years.) Rudolph, whose smile you can almost detect as Choose Me’s possibilities for conflict keep accruing, eventually has Nancy answer a seeking-roommate ad posted by Eve, without either person realizing their on-air connection. Nancy begins an affair with Mickey herself. (He stops by the apartment looking for Eve, but, after noticing that she isn’t home, gets to talking with her covert radio-therapist roommate and realizes he likes her.)
You can tell the characters of Choose Me have been feeling desperate for a while now when you first meet them. They read like people who can’t stop biting their nails, who have maybe even experienced a couple of times absent-mindedly itching a scratch on, say, the back of their neck and not realizing their fingers have dug in hard enough to extract blood until it’s too late. (It’s only fitting that the title of the movie reads like a plea; you can picture it delivered with downturned eyes and a choked-back sob.) The actors all give insistent, believably vulnerable performances (though Carradine emits a vaguely untrustworthy cool). Warren, though, is the film’s highlight as a woman whose simultaneous self-contempt and self-pity feels fully realized — like Warren had discreetly devised an entire character history in a notebook before shooting began. The last few moments of the movie — the image I’ll remember most — speak to how capably Warren conveys Eve’s ever-shifting certainty in what she’s doing and what she wants. Having just gotten impulsively married in Vegas, her face communicates someone concurrently hopeful for and deeply frightened of what the future holds.
This concluding ambivalence also put me in mind of Louis Malle’s The Lovers (1958), which I watched for the first time recently. Similarly, a pair of lovers, who more likely than not aren’t soulmates, decides hastily to commit themselves to each other. The gesture comes with an undercurrent of deep-seated apprehension that sticks in our mind because it’s so uncommon in movies, which typically show love as a foolproof salve for all of one’s troubles. A Vegas’d out Eve notes to an inquisitive passenger that while she and her new husband didn’t technically gamble while they were in town, their new marriage is just another form of it. It’s a sentiment that rings true for the movie holistically. It’s a film where romantic bedlam and fears and futures move around on a sheet of ice; you’re always anticipating the worst. Rudolph makes you hope for things to work out without implicitly promising anything. Part of what makes Choose Me vivid is its devotion to, and fascination with, precariousness — the unpredictable.
Peterson Reviews 