What a wonderful movie! After the middling reviews and box office (I can't even remember why I rented it), I was completely taken by surprise by this gorgeous, funny, and sublimely entertaining film. Too much to disentangle here (and part of me thinks teasing out the political and feminist point of view of the film is a waste of time--much of the meaning and pleasure derives from the simultaneously meeting and flouting of expectations, often at the same time, with regard to gender and genre. Get it?) I haven't really seen enough of the Doris Day--Rock Hudson films it is dealing with, but I am familiar with that general aesthetic. The foregrounding (and then some) of the sexual subtext of those films provides most of the humor, but it cuts both ways: when the two leads flirt over the phone a split screen effect puts them in various sexual positions, yet that joke reveals the deeper joke that the phone conversation, and implicity the conversational repartee so ever-present in older films, is a form of sparring not unlike sex itself, with concomitant pleasures. Enough of that. Simply put, this movie makes postmodernism fun again.
Finally, what's up with the absolutely brilliant art in the background all the time? Is it the real thing or set design? I want it! (And really finally, this experience has made me promise myself to never do a top ten again. This film would have easily made the top 3, if not higher.)
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