BLUME IN LOVE
Direction and Screenplay by
PAUL MAZURSKY
The befuddled, sometimes frantic but eminently fitting hero who scrambles through this sly concordance of the perils of marriage is a Beverly Hills divorce lawyer named Steven Blume. His business is bustling, but his marriage has broken apart. As Blume in Love begins, he is in Venice licking his wounds, dwelling lovingly on memories of Nina (Susan Anspach). Their divorce, for Blume, has only quickened his consuming desire to possess her once again. "To be in love with your ex-wife is a tragedy," Blume pouts, watching the diverse assignations in St. Mark's Square with bemused, slightly melancholy detachment, like a bruised veteran watching a game from the sidelines.
Blume savors his exile, dotes on the recollections it brings of happier times with Nina (they honeymooned there), and tortures himself with images of guilt and treachery from the more recent past. Back in Venice, California, Nina worked for the state welfare office and returned early one day to find that Blume had, in his words, "taken his work home with him." "Hi, Mrs. Blume," said the work, sulking against the bedroom door, and Nina walked out. There was a quick, acrimonious divorce. Blume reveled briefly in the freedoms of bachelorhood, but turned possessive and desperate when Nina started keeping company with an itinerant musician named Elmo (Kris Kristofferson). Blume, of course, did everything he could to bust them up and reinstate himself.
Director-Writer Mazursky is devastatingly shrewd and wry, especially adept at catching the most convoluted of emotional entanglements and turning them into the kind of comedy that pierces. Blume's often quite mad struggle to wriggle back into wedded bliss is an ideal occasion for Mazursky to comment once again (as he did in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and in the more ambitious and more interesting Alex in Wonderland) on the folkways of contemporary romance, where an innocent conversation can turn abruptly into a sexual scrimmage, and a tryst into trench warfare. He excels at putting down the trappings and pretensions of the middle-class life of Los Angeles with tart asides on stylish psychiatrists discussing the notion of "sport screwing," teen-age swingers, and hip health-food restaurants where satanic waiters recite the menu like an incantation. Yet he can be tender, too, and his characters are never merely clowns or pawns of plot. With a deft and cunning irony, he can point out the essential selfishness of Blume's anguish without ever playing down to it. Occasionally, though, Mazursky loses perspective, and his characters become unintentionally funny. This happens when Nina addresses her unborn child: "If you're a boy kid, I'm gonna teach you to respect women. And if you're a girl kid, I'm gonna teach you to respect yourself." That is the sort of shallow illumination that Mazursky usually mocks with glee.