Lost Angeles

By JAY COCKS

WELCOME TO L.A.

Directed and Written by ALAN RUDOLPH

Despite a few missteps, this movie marks the most promising debut of a young American director in too long a time. Full of sly insights about the inhabitants of the great city on the Fault, Welcome to L.A. is a chilly, funny assessment of life under the sun and near the edge.

Director-Writer Alan Rudolph, 32, is a protege of Robert Altman. Rudolph worked on Nashville and wrote the screenplay of Buffalo Bill and the Indians; Altman is the producer of Welcome to L.A. There are pronounced traces of Altman's style here--mainly in the kaleidoscopic plot construction that is reminiscent of Nashville. Rudolph has his own voice, however, and he has found it early. He falters at times, lets his ambition slide into pretension, pampers a line of dialogue until it just arches its back and slinks away. Allowances should be made for first features--they are so much more public and expensive than, say, first novels--but Rudolph's work is already so assured that he does not even have to call in all his indulgences.

The movie is a pop fresco of L.A. set over the course of a recent Christmas time, sweeping across the people who come and go, get stuck, stay. The plot--a nicely engineered collision of characters, all of whom are somehow related--is framed around a wound-up musician named Eric Wood (Richard Baskin) and his flailing efforts to finish a record album. Wood's music bears all the other characters along. Carroll Barber (Keith Carradine), who wrote some of the tunes that Wood records, is an itinerant composer called back to L.A. by his agent (Viveca Lindfors) at the request of his businessman father (Denver Pyle), who has not seen his son in three years. Carroll puts up in a rented house supplied by a real estate woman (Sally Kellerman), who also sends along a young maid (Sissy Spacek) with a disposition for topless housecleaning. The maid has a thing going with a man named Hood (Harvey Keitel), who works for the elder Barber. Hood's wife Karen (Geraldine Chaplin), given to coughing fits in imitation of Camille, starts a thwarted affair with Carroll. All of these intimacies are recorded by a photographer named Nona (Lauren Hutton), who excels at taking pictures of corners. "Makes sense out of them too," boasts her lover, who is Carroll's father.

Tracing Routes. It all makes a sort of angular La Ronde, a slightly cynical, increasingly desperate comedy. For all the interrelationships and coincidences, none of the people here can make connection with one another. Some, like Karen Hood, have even given up trying. She spends her days attending matinees in empty movie theaters, or cruising around in taxis, keeping careful record of their numbers and tracing their routes on a map.

Rudolph's Los Angeles is ravishing to look at, lit by Cinematographer Dave Myers to catch the vibrancy of Southern California colors subdued as if by sunset. Richard Baskin's music is a little too florid but the large troupe of actors work uniformly well. Particularly good are Harvey Keitel, unexpectedly appearing as a straight-arrow businessman, Kellerman, with her anxious sensuality, and Hutton, a sort of carbolic sprite. As for Sissy Spacek, it is clear after Welcome to L.A., Badlands and Carrie (TIME, Nov. 8) that she is an actress of apparently effortless versatility and finesse.

Jay Cocks

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