Word: nina
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Altman riddles the movie with moments like this, keeping viewers constantly off balance. He jumps deftly from satire and black comedy to utter seriousness and back again as he introduces new characters. The scenes between Sterling Hayden and Nina van Pallandt (as the drunk, impotent writer and his enigmatic wife) are moving and terrifying. But suddenly, another character enters the picture--one time it's Henry Gibson, playing a creepy little shrink--and the film makes an abrupt, exhilarating shift of gears. Like the rest of the movie, the syrupy musical score can't be taken too seriously...
While many braided men-as well as women-cajole friends or family into helping them twine their locks, others visit an expanding coterie of cornrowing specialists. Manhattan Corn-Rower Femi Sarah Heggie has plaited the likes of Aretha Franklin, Melvin Van Peebles, Nina Simone and Dick Williams. Brooklyn Plaiter Christine Harper, on the other hand, concentrates on braiding businessmen in their 20s and 30s. "Rugged he-men types are my best customers," she says. The mahatma of Washington corn-rowers is Nat Mathis, better known to friends and customers as Nat the Bush Doctor. Nat began his career with Afros...
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...
...characters are never merely clowns or pawns of plot. With a deft and cunning irony, he can point out the essential selfishness of Blume's anguish without ever playing down to it. Occasionally, though, Mazursky loses perspective, and his characters become unintentionally funny. This happens when Nina addresses her unborn child: "If you're a boy kid, I'm gonna teach you to respect women. And if you're a girl kid, I'm gonna teach you to respect yourself." That is the sort of shallow illumination that Mazursky usually mocks with glee...
...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 film since Jane Fonda in Klute - a remarkable performance which Anspach equals in every...