Word: blume
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...BLUME IN LOVE...
...befuddled, sometimes frantic but eminently fitting hero who scrambles through this sly concordance of the perils of marriage is a Beverly Hills divorce lawyer named Steven Blume. His business is bustling, but his marriage has broken apart. As Blume in Love begins, he is in Venice licking his wounds, dwelling lovingly on memories of Nina (Susan Anspach). Their divorce, for Blume, has only quickened his consuming desire to possess her once again. "To be in love with your ex-wife is a tragedy," Blume pouts, watching the diverse assignations in St. Mark's Square with bemused, slightly melancholy detachment...
...Blume savors his exile, dotes on the recollections it brings of happier times with Nina (they honeymooned there), and tortures himself with images of guilt and treachery from the more recent past. Back in Venice, California, Nina worked for the state welfare office and returned early one day to find that Blume had, in his words, "taken his work home with him." "Hi, Mrs. Blume," said the work, sulking against the bedroom door, and Nina walked out. There was a quick, acrimonious divorce. Blume reveled briefly in the freedoms of bachelorhood, but turned possessive and desperate when Nina started keeping...
Director-Writer Mazursky is devastatingly shrewd and wry, especially adept at catching the most convoluted of emotional entanglements and turning them into the kind of comedy that pierces. Blume's often quite mad struggle to wriggle back into wedded bliss is an ideal occasion for Mazursky to comment once again (as he did in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and in the more ambitious and more interesting Alex in Wonderland) on the folkways of contemporary romance, where an innocent conversation can turn abruptly into a sexual scrimmage, and a tryst into trench warfare. He excels at putting...
George Segal's Blume is a dexterous performance driven by demons, Kristofferson's Elmo relaxed and appealing. Besides a great deal of what seems like effortless ability, Kristofferson has vast charm and the sort of presence that makes you look forward to his every appearance. He is, naturally and winningly, what so many others strain so hard to be: a star. Susan Anspach, as Nina, is musky and alluring and, even more important, a splendid actress. Hers is the most carefully detailed, most complex and moving re-creation of a woman that has been seen in an American...