Video clip - featuring Hugh Laurie. Clip has been edited [11.5 MB]

BY ROGER EBERT / June 22, 1990

The most romantic passage in any relationship, I sometimes think, is just before you start beginning to know the other person. They still remain an intriguing mystery, so you can project your desires and fantasies onto them: Potentially they represent everything you've been searching for. The other person, of course, is equally free to project fantasies upon your screen, and at some point in this process the two people agree that they were destined for each other. Then the painful and difficult process of getting to know the other person begins, and destiny takes a holiday.

The opening scenes of David Hare's "Strapless" are poised at precisely such a moment in the relationship of two strangers: Lillian, an American nurse who has worked for several years in London, and Raymond, a mysterious stranger she meets while on holiday. They encounter each other in a church. Each is clearly intrigued. Raymond is the kind of man who seems able to anticipate just what a woman wants to hear, and to say it just before she knows she needs to hear it.

Lillian, an independent and lonely woman, finds herself saying things she thought she'd never say again.

Back in London, life goes on. Lillian (Blair Brown) is involved in labor activities at the hospital, where the nursing staff opposes budget cuts by the Thatcher regime. At home, her life is complicated by the arrival of Amy, a younger sister (Bridget Fonda), who sleeps with a succession of boyfriends and makes vague plans to support herself as a dress designer. One day Amy tells Lillian she is pregnant and plans to have the baby - primarily, it would seem, in order to experience the wonders of going through natural childbirth while listening to Mozart.

Lillian is appalled by the irresponsibility of Amy's life, but she also is burdened by the responsibilities of her own; as the head of the strike committee, she spends long hours nursing and then additional hours in negotiations, and as an American she sometimes feels she is an outsider no matter what she does. Then Raymond (Bruno Ganz, the sad angel in "Wings of Desire") comes back into her life. He has a home in London, it would seem. The expensive little house is decorated in impeccable taste and filled with the most exquisite personal possessions.

Everything about Raymond speaks of money and taste. But who is he, really, and where does he come from? How does he make his money? Can Lillian trust him? These are questions that fade in the flame of their passion, but they need to be answered, and Raymond is clearly incapable of answering them. He is, in fact, incapable of any commitment at all, and the viewer begins to suspect he is addicted only to the early stages of a relationship. He likes the intrigue of seduction but not the messiness of love.

"Strapless" was written and directed by the playwright David Hare ("Plenty," "A Map of the World"), who includes one perfect scene that explains Raymond without explaining him. I will not diminish the pleasure of the scene by describing it, except to say that it provides us with a glimpse of Raymond's past that makes us feel a particular sympathy for him, as we do for any wounded creature.

The title of the movie is referred to in a scene where the two sisters and some other women try on strapless gowns that Amy has designed, and Amy says, "They shouldn't stay up, but they do." Presumably David Hare is trying the same trick with the whole movie, suspending his characters and plot in the air without benefit of the usual structural supports. That works with the relationship between Raymond and Lillian, which must be an enigma in order to work at all.

But the movie falters badly in its subplot about labor unions and industrial relations - it's as if Hare wanted to work some social commentary into a story that has no room for it.

By Hal Hinson

Washington Post Staff Writer
May 19, 1990

Bruno Ganz oozes into David Hare's "Strapless" like a Cerruti-clad snail. Elegantly soft-spoken, immaculately well-mannered in a slow-gliding continental manner, he's a dapper enigma, an aloof figure of mystery. When he approaches Lillian (Blair Brown), a London-based American doctor on vacation alone in Europe, his moves have a practiced ease. He's done this before, and knows the lady's objections even before she does. Having had her objections overwhelmed, she agrees to have lunch, at least, and sitting in the perfect sunlight at a restaurant they talk in teasing circles around each other, hiding as much as they reveal.

"Do you like the beach?" he asks.

"No, my skin is too white," she answers.

"I like the open air."

"I like horses."

Oh waiter? Check, please!

"Strapless," which Hare wrote as well as directed, is a muffled, romantic art movie, enervating and preposterously rarefied, in which every exchange seems to take place under inches-thick plate glass. From its stately opening shots of classical statuary, which flash on screen like slides in an art history class while Nat King Cole croons a velvety ballad, the movie seems to be about a certain kind of bone-tired sophistication; its characters' joints ache from Old World fatigue.


But Hare doesn't seem to have anything on his mind beyond this generalized dopey malaise. The peculiar relationship between Lillian and Raymond (Ganz), which picks up back in London when Raymond shows up on her doorstep with a horse, is the movie's focus. Quickly, Raymond proposes and, after a period of suspicion and resistance, Lillian agrees to their marriage. All the while, we're aware that the picture is askew, and that while Hare is dropping hints about Raymond, he isn't really willing to tell us what's going on.


What's obvious is that Hare intends for us to see Raymond, who says that he likes the early days of romance, "when love is given freely," as an irresistible figure. Clearly, he's conceived as a man who lives for a kind of pure, untainted, passionate love. But to us, he comes across more as insufferably smug. Smiling his tiny secret smile, he seems tickled pink with himself. Plus, he's so cool and ineffable that he's more a romantic apparition than flesh and blood.


Ganz seemed more substantial playing an angel in "Wings of Desire" than he does here. Admittedly, he looks great in his Italian fashions, and he has some of the charismatic homeliness that Bogart had. But when one night he tells Lillian that he's stepping out for a short walk, never to return, the character slips into soap-opera absurdity.


Raymond's departure comes after Lillian tells him that they're married now and he needn't continue his pursuit. But we never know whether he split because of his outrageous money problems or because those open, early days of love are gone. At any rate, his exit leaves Lillian to settle his affairs, and there's an implied redemption in her coming to his rescue. But Brown, who's somewhat inexplicably cast as a Katharine Hepburnish spinster, can't give us a clear presentation of her character's agenda. She moves through the film with a look of painful befuddlement plastered on her face. The character is a cipher; she never seems to quite figure out what's happening. And aside from a couple of dazzling moments in which she shows how thoroughly she's given herself over to Raymond, even though he's no longer around, Brown's performance is mousy and drab.


A couple of the film's later scenes indicate that the point Hare wants to make has something to do with her character's struggle to participate in life, to join in, to love. To develop this theme, he's created a subplot involving Lillian's participation in a protest over the government's cutback of hospital funds, but though we see the connections Hare is struggling to make, they don't explain nearly as much as he hopes for them to. Also, another subplot involving Lillian's reprobate younger sister, Amy (played with tantalizing fire by Bridget Fonda), amounts to very little. However, it's Amy's designs for the strapless gowns that give the movie its title (they shouldn't stay up but, somehow, they do) but Hare tosses in this notion of invisible support far too late, out of desperation. If only he'd told us it was about surviving, we could have skipped out much earlier.


Copyright The Washington Post

FILM FESTIVAL; Two U.S. Women in Crisis In the England of Thatcher
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: September 23, 1989, Saturday

LEAD: ''Strapless,'' the new film written by David Hare, the English playwright, is about two American women, sisters, who come to terms with their womanhood in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's England. The movie is about some of the perils of womanhood and what Mr. Hare sees as unbridled Toryism.

''Strapless,'' the new film written by David Hare, the English playwright, is about two American women, sisters, who come to terms with their womanhood in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's England. The movie is about some of the perils of womanhood and what Mr. Hare sees as unbridled Toryism.

Lillian Hempel (Blair Brown), in her early 40's, is a dedicated doctor who has been working in London for 12 years because she feels deeply about the humanism of Britain's National Health program.

Amy Hempel (Bridget Fonda), 15 years younger than Lillian, is on her first visit to London, which, for her, swings as it did in movies about the 1960's. Amy wants to be a dress designer but, for the moment, she is having fun. Her London is a place of all-night parties and impromptu love affairs.

''Strapless'' also involves Raymond Forbes (Bruno Ganz), who has a slight German accent, lives outside Toronto and makes a lot of money as an entrepreneur, as he says vaguely, ''buying and selling.''

Lillian first meets Raymond in Portugal, where she has gone on a holiday. For him it is love at first sight. Lillian cannot quite believe his ardor, but she is drawn by his romantic nature. He is everything her scientific mind has denied, up until now.

Back in London (he seems to have forgotten his home in Toronto), Raymond gives Lillian a horse named Heart Free and she moves in with him.

''Strapless'' has a great deal of story, none of it spontaneous, all of it to be interpreted in social and political terms. Everything that happens has an almost arithmetical importance in the final equation that is the film. This frequently happens in the work of Mr. Hare, who writes dialogue that alternates bon mots with information one might otherwise find in footnotes. It explains the film's greater meanings.

As was apparent in Fred Schepisi's film version of the Hare play ''Plenty,'' and in ''Wetherby,'' written and directed by the playwright, Mr. Hare has a lot of interesting things to say that don't get easily said in the film form. He appears to be in touch with the world, genuinely concerned with what's going on (in this case, with the National Health system). Yet his fiction, which he concocts to engage our mind through the emotions, is dead.

''Strapless'' is of a pre-planned orderliness to make the symmetries of ''Plenty'' and ''Wetherby'' look as wildly improvised as a Nichols and May sketch.

Mr. Hare treats his characters much in the way that a rich, politically liberal housewife might treat her servants. He is concerned with his characters' welfare, but woe to those who show signs of having lives of their own. Mr. Hare is ruthless in the manner in which he shapes characters to fit larger points.

The points in ''Strapless'' have to do with the quality of life in England today and, more specifically, with women on their own. At the end of the film, Lillian and Amy have each learned that they cannot depend on the men they love. They have to hold themselves up, much in the manner of (are you ready?) the strapless evening gowns, designed by Amy, that are the focal point of a fashion show featured at an anti-Thatcher rally.

The metaphor seems a bit overstated for even the most doltish member of the movie audience.

Both Miss Brown and Miss Fonda have done far better work elsewhere. In ''Strapless,'' they are competent without ever being exciting, which is the nature of the film.

Mr. Ganz is not especially persuasive as the film's most original character, an aging Don Juan and scamp who is always sincere. He falls madly in love with a succession of women, whom he inevitably leaves in unhappy circumstances, sometimes loaded with debts. He's the sort of man who always means it when he says he loves someone. The trouble is, he doesn't mean it five minutes later.