High Season Directed by Clare Peploe Starring Jacqueline Bisset, Sebastian Shaw and Kenneth Branagh Rough Magic Directed by Clare Peploe Starring Bridget Fonda, Russell Crowe and Jim Broadbent BUY IT High Season Rough Magic A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow The Boys of Summer: Baseball's All Star Game Now Showing New video releases for July 7 Y E S T E R D A Y Dig his mood By John Milward Putting the "roll" back into rock 'n' roll: An interview with Nick Lowe (07/03/98) Husbands and wives By Joyce Millman "Everybody Loves Raymond" is a family sitcom -- but it's not about the kids (07/03/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Without reservations By Mary Elizabeth Williams A conversation with "Smoke Signals'" Sherman Alexie (07/02/98) Armageddon Reviewed by Charles Taylor This summer's other meteor movie is so dumb and unimaginative, it would even embarrass NASA (07/01/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor "The Border": Jack Nicholson's broken promised land (06/30/98) American Squirm By Sarah Vowell Fishers of men: Two offbeat TV talk shows reinvent the celebrity interview (06/29/98) Heroine chic By Lori Leibovich Ally Sheedy talks about the hard road to "High Art" (06/25/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

[ H O M E_.M O V I E S_.B Y_.C H A R L E S_.T A Y L O R ]________ _____________________V___i d e o_.v a c a t i o n ___________________. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ______TAKE A BLISSFUL ______HOLIDAY WITH ______THE SUMMERY, ______SENSUOUS ______MOVIES OF ______CLARE PEPLOE. "I could look at that view forever," says a character in Clare Peploe's "High Season" as he stares out at the blue Mediterranean. Lulled into a state of perfect contentment by the gorgeous surroundings, you may feel that nothing could be more worth your time than that same luxurious indolence. Summer is the perfect season to discover the movies of Clare Peploe. "High Season" (1988) and "Rough Magic" (1997) are like perfect vacations, yummy getaways filled with stunning views and interesting people. They're blessedly relaxing and fizzy at the same time, with just enough going on in them to prevent you from totally blissing out. Peploe knows that putting her audience at their ease is the best way to heighten their appreciation of sensuous pleasures, and the smallest details in these movies seem sinfully delightful: ripe cherries served in the blazing midday sun; a cold, refreshing beer; comfortable wrinkled linen worn next to the skin; a lazily smoked cigarette; the sight of a woman's bounteous curls hanging down her back. Peploe makes comedies that are damnably hard to classify. She's drawn to exotic settings -- the Greek isle of Rhodes in "High Season," rural Mexico in "Rough Magic" -- and plots that start out as seemingly random bits and pieces. The pleasure lies in watching how those disparate parts come together. It's a bit like sitting out a get-acquainted dance at some tropical resort for the kick of seeing who'll pair off with whom. Best known for the work she and her brother Mark have done on screenplays for Antonioni and for her husband, Bernardo Bertolucci, Peploe is singularly talented and deserves to be known as a director in her own right. Her pictures appear loose-limbed and casual (that's part of their appeal), but they're really trickily structured affairs. "High Season" is amazingly accomplished for a first film; it seems so effortless. The characters are either likable phonies or ordinary people who give in to silly enchantment under the Grecian sun (and especially the moonlight). As shot by Chris Menges, "High Season" is beautiful beyond belief. The vistas of sea and sky are so crystalline that the horizon is as sharp as a tailor's crease in a new pair of trousers. Jacqueline Bisset plays Katherine Shaw, an English photographer who may be forced, in financial straits, to sell her hilltop Rhodes home. The place is her refuge, and she hopes to salvage it by selling a Grecian pot given to her by her dear friend, an elderly art historian named Basil Sharp (the matchless Sebastian Shaw). Sharpie, as he's affectionately called, insists the pot is a fake, but a Greek art dealer named Konstantinis (Robert Stephens) is prepared to pay as if it's the real thing. The other revelers at this midsummer ball include a British civil servant, Rick Lamb (Kenneth Branagh), who's brought his wife Carol (Lesley Manville) to Rhodes on a working holiday. Carol falls for Yanni (Paris Tselios), an ambitious young merchant who wants to bring Rhodes into the modern age, much to the consternation of his mother, Penelope (Irene Papas, in a comic version of the Greek earth goddess roles that have defined her), who claims Yanni's efforts are a slander to the memory of his dead father, a hero of the Greek resistance. Yanni hears Carol's name and -- at once -- sees her as Caroline Lamb, the reincarnation of Lord Byron's great love (Byron died at Missolonghi, fighting beside Greek insurgents). Rick, meanwhile, takes one open-mouthed gander at Katherine and is immediately smitten. Who could blame him? In "High Season," Bisset's acting finally lives up to her famous beauty. All flowing clothes and lush brown curls, Bisset is more at ease -- both as an actress and with her own gorgeousness -- than ever. She's an English rose become a tranquil Mediterranean blossom. When she and Rick take a moonlit skinny dip, you understand why she's his dream woman, and the I-can't-believe-my-luck expression on Branagh's gob makes Katherine seem even more of a dream creature. Mocking bumbling English masculine pride, Branagh does well what Hugh Grant tends to overdo. There's also Katherine's ex-husband Patrick (James Fox, a superb farceur), a sculptor who allows himself to be fruit for the picking of any young female tourist, and their daughter Chloe (Ruby Baker), a disarmingly inquisitive and levelheaded little sun sprite. The jokes have to do with the characters' transformations and their secrets, which creep out into the open one by one. Nobody has more to hide than Sharpie. If "High Season" is anyone's movie, it's Sebastian Shaw's. He delivers his lines with a tart crispness, as if encouraging others to guess what he teasingly intimates. "High Season" plays like a debate about tradition vs. progress conducted at a masquerade ball. Sharpie argues with Konstantinis, Yanni with Penelope, Katherine with Patrick. Peploe knows that the arguments between them are unresolvable, and even, on some level, supremely enjoyable. (One look at Katherine and Patrick squabbling tells you they're meant for each other.) Disagreements are spice in "High Season," the pleasant irritant of life in a sun-drenched paradise. "Rough Magic" is an even more exotic creation, a hard-boiled melodrama reimagined as a magical realist fable. The movie's source is "Miss Shumway Waves a Wand," a novel by the British pulp writer James Hadley Chase. The execution is like some pop-noir daydream of a García Márquez story. Set in the 1950s, "Rough Magic" stars the radiant Bridget Fonda as Myra Shumway, a magician's assistant who's breaking up the act to marry a rich, arrogant dullard (D.W. Moffett) who's been handpicked for a Senate seat. Myra's boss (Kenneth Mars) insists she's throwing away her true magical powers, but his scheme to thwart the marriage results in a terrible accident that sends Myra fleeing to Mexico with incriminating evidence on her fiancé. He arranges for Alex Ross (Russell Crowe), a newspaper stringer stationed south of the border, to keep tabs on Myra. They wind up traveling together, and soon the two of them hook up with Doc Ansell (Jim Broadbent, who has the distinctive, endearing eccentricity of '30s character actors like Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton). Doc -- whose traveling companion is his adorable little Jack Russell terrier, a born scene stealer -- is a genial con man who nonetheless knows the real thing when he sees it. Getting a gander at Myra's shaman's belt (a gift from her boss), he figures she's the gal to discover the ingredients of an ancient Mexican miracle potion he's been hoping to get his hands on. This road trip is like a honeymoon that gets under way before the courtship has barely begun. What happens could be read as a fable about a woman who comes to learn her own inner strength -- except that the movie isn't sappy or wide-eyed or preachy. The hocus-pocus of the story is grounded in the wised-up attitude of noir. When Alex jumps into Myra's convertible, he gives her a long once-over and announces, "If I couldn't smell tamales cookin', I'd swear I'd died and gone to heaven." And she replies, "Lie under the back wheels and I'll do what I can to get you there." Dozens of movies in the last few years have self-consciously tried to revive noir by focusing on elaborate period production design or exaggerated brutality. Peploe's laid-back approach -- epitomized by that exchange between Fonda and Crowe -- comes closer to the no-big-deal spirit of noir than any of them. Russell Crowe gets to be sexy and breezy here in a way that the reductive machismo of his star-making role in the self-serious "L.A. Confidential" didn't allow for. (It takes a certain type of movie-star glamour to still look good with three days' worth of whiskers.) Fonda, with her shoulder-length pageboy and cinched-to-the-waist dresses (designed by Richard Hornung), has her best chance ever to parlay her talent for smoldering insinuation. Visually, she calls up the 19-year-old Lauren Bacall of "To Have and Have Not," but she's a better actress, and if such a thing is possible, swings her hips even more enticingly. (Her gait suggests a naturalistic version of what Fred Astaire meant in "The Bandwagon" when, seeing Cyd Charisse saunter toward him, he says, "She came at me in sections.") The burden of the movie's most outlandish plot twists are square on her shoulders, and she pulls each one off with an assured, stylish bravado that's flabbergasting. Peploe is squarely behind Doc Ansell's thesis that real magic isn't the stuff of tricks but a genuine potent force. "Rough Magic" and "High Season" suggest she's earned the right to that belief. It's not sleight of hand that can make lightning strike twice like this. It's the real McCoy. SALON | July 7, 1998 Charles Taylor's video column, Home Movies, appears in Salon every Tuesday. - - - - - - - - - - - - N O W_S H O W I N G [ New releases available July 7 ] "The Boxer" "Good Will Hunting" "Palmetto"