Director: Alan Rudolph
Year Released: 1988
Rating: 3.0
Effective mood-piece about American expatriates living in Paris - Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein among them - and their days of hard drinking, hard loving and hard boxing. Those that claim that the film is slow and sloppy forget that slow and sloppy is Rudolph's style - he lazily wafts through the romantically foggy nights and through bars and cafes packed with artists, hangers on and alcoholics, not trying to capture the real city, but with the idealized city of literature. Hemingway may be reduced to a human anecdote machine (he exists to recite lines from the novels), but it isn't really supposed to be the real Hemingway, the way the Cézanne and Modigliani pieces - after the big mix-up - aren't the real originals. The viewpoint of art as being both priceless and meaningless is covered, and the question is left: How do you know if that 'classic' piece of work in a museum isn't actually a forgery? How valuable is something that can so easily be forged? Is a forgery as 'worthy' as the original if the price tag on it is high enough and no one knows the difference?
