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Buoyed by some stylish exoticism, by Krabbé's ferocious performance as its bedeviled protagonist (a less-gay gay the movies have never offered) and by the mysteriously growing repute of Director Paul Verhoeven (he was responsible for the stodgy Soldier of Orange and the ugly Spelters), The 4th Man is bobbing prosperously along the art circuit, a midsummer night's titillation for the would-be with-its. But the movie's ultimate fate, surely, is to be celebrated, along with Pink Flamingos and its ilk, at the midnight masses of the lavender thrill mob. —R.S.
ANOTHER COUNTRY
A decade after the Great War, the playing fields of Eton and Westminster were trod by a generation of upper-class traitors to the Empire: Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and the rest. In the 1980s, these homegrown spies have stoked a boomlet of plays, TV shows and films. Julian Mitchell's 1981 play, Another Country, is set in a public school very much like Eton and features a 17-year-old, Guy Bennett, very much like the young Guy Burgess. Prinked up in Oscar Wilde frippery, gaily mocking the prefects' hypocritical rites of passage, standing defiantly outside this class system, Bennett is a sexual subversive. By play's end, encouraged by a caustic Marxist classmate, Guy is ready to become a political subversive as well. Traitor to his gender, traitor to his country. Why bloody not?
The play worked. As witty and discreet as if it had been written in the 1930's, it defined Bennett's rebellion against his austere schoolmates as one of style and substance. The film version, directed by Marek Kanievska, is a botch. Every shot is vaselined with romanticism; every dewy undergraduate looks ready to pose in his Calvins; and Rupert Everett's Bennett, a dandy dandy on the London stage, has become gross onscreen. Instead of a national tragedy in embryo, what we get is a posh summer camp. —By Richard Corliss
ERENDIRA The dreamscape of a Gabriel García Márquez story is like the vision of a Chagall on peyote. Violence and magic live there, in a desert village that holds the secret to every folktale and human atrocity. There a rose can glow in the dark, an orange open to reveal a diamond in its center, a paper butterfly take flight and land against a wall, fresh and flat as new paint. In a dark, lush corner of the Garcia Marquez canvas one can see Erendira (pronounced Eh-ren-de-ra) and her dotty grandmother. They live alone, slave and exacting mistress of a crumbling manor, and when the house burns down, Grandma blames Erendira and takes the girl out to the desert to earn their keep on her back. Erendira's passive expertise as a prostitute makes her famous and her grandmother rich; soldiers and senators pay dearly for her favors. Only a young man named Ulysses has the key to her chaste heart. He will free Erendira by killing Grandma—he will try, anyway, with a knife, explosives and a ton of rat poison—but the tenacious crone is as hard to dispatch as Rasputin, or the Roadrunner, or a nightmare of repression.