The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 8-14
Modern Romance (1981)
Directed by Albert Brooks
In taking a full measure of the subtle depths of Brooks’s comic masterpiece, let us put aside the “romance” for now and focus on main character Robert Cole’s (Brooks) day job as a film editor. Having seen Robert’s clingy, narcissistic tendencies elsewhere, one might expect him to be similarly domineering in the editing room as he and Jay (Bruno Kirby) work on a sci-fi cheapie starring George Kennedy for director David (James L. Brooks). Turns out, though, that Robert mostly bends to the insecure director’s wishes, in service to his boss’s cinematic vision, unwilling to risk conflict professionally even as he continually courts romantically. Such contradictions mark Modern Romance as a whole, which is, above all, a character study of a deeply complicated individual. One may have reactions ranging from discomfiting amusement to flat-out horror at Robert’s behavior even as one can, on some level, understand the idealistic desire for an all-consuming love that underpins it. Brooks supports this unblinking gaze with an aesthetic that prizes long takes, wide and medium shots, and utmost realism, keeping us close to this character even as it refuses to indicate to us how we should feel about him. Robert Cole may be a neurotic monster in some ways, but one of Brooks’s great achievements in Modern Romance is to make him feel all-too-human in his failings. Kenji Fujishima (February 10, 9:15pm; February 12, 4:15pm; February 14, 6:45pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “Valentine’s Day Massacre 2017”)