Funky Funk

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SLAVES OF NEW YORK

Directed by James Ivory

Screenplay by Tama Janowitz

They should have filmed Tama Janowitz's publicity campaign. It was a lot more entertaining, and possibly more sociologically edifying, than Slaves of New York, the collection of short stories about the downtown art scene that book flacks so heedlessly hyped to bestsellerdom. Alas, the movie people got stuck with the book and with its author as screenwriter. And now the public is stuck with a movie that compares rather unfavorably to periodontal work in amusement value.

Sustained, coherent narrative is not, shall we say, Janowitz's great strength, and neither is dramatic characterization. Eleanor (the normally perky, cuddly Bernadette Peters in sadly deflated condition) is a designer of funky hats who suffers from a possibly justifiable weakness of the ego. She lives with a graffiti artist named Stash (Adam Coleman Howard) who has a definitely unjustified air of superiority. Before they finally break up, this tedious pair go to many noisy parties and performance-art evenings. Along the way, art-world fights, flirtations and fornications are noted but not explored in a script that is always lumbering off up aimlessly false trails. Indeed, many characters are written so dimly that it is often hard to tell one from the other.

The fault is not entirely Janowitz's. Her only hope was to find a director who could either respond avidly to the sexual and creative energies of the avant-garde scene or take a satirical cudgel to it. Instead, she drew distant, enervated James Ivory (A Room with a View, Heat and Dust, The Bostonians), who never seems to engage fully with any subject he has tackled and who has never been more fastidiously withdrawn than he is here. In this case, however, audiences will be well advised to follow his example.

-- R.S.