Word: zee
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (Abrams; 200 pages; $35) documents this flowering, from the Paris-trained sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, who built her studio with her own hands, through Painter William H. Johnson, who renounced his academic style for a self-enforced primitivism, to James Van Der Zee, whose camera was witness to Harlem weddings, funerals and roaring good times...
...dismisses Zee's repeated insistence that someone is following her as total paranoia. However, at the Cafe is one of the myriad errant street performers filing New York City an the summer-time: a man with a domesticated pigeon. As the movie develops, Larry the pigeon-man also becomes an acquaintance of Zee and Eli, haunting the film with his creepy looks and weird movements. In between his acts he sits at the Cafe with a girl who reads with the pigeon perched on her head. In one scene Larry looks at a girl's t-shirt that reads...
Such interludes abound throughout the film. And though many are not as funny as intended, they at least serve to transmit the feeling of New York City's colorful West side in the summertime. Zee and Eli frequent the New York Philharmonic's free concerts in Central Park, visit the Museum of Natural History, and Zee practices her singing (the career she dropped when she got married) at the "Improv...
KAREN BLACK PROVES adept at characterizing Zee, evolving with her as she adapts to life without a husband. Whereas in the beginning she says, "Life's just not what they told us it was going to be," later she tells Eli "You know life's just the most mysterious thing...every moment you look around and it's a new life...it's like waking up in the middle of a dream...I think I just woke up." Black wakes us up with Zee. Her idiosyncracies and eccentricity make her an endearing character. And while the material Black works with...
...uncomfortable and unpleasant elements of the movie ultimately drown out these comical and enlightening parts. Eli persists with his pulse meter after Zee has threatened to stop all relations with him, Zee's singing takes on ever-more morbid connotations, and Eli's annoying analysis of everything become cumbersome. If you can overlook these pitfalls, however, there are enough plain, good and funny displays of the essence of human relationships that make the film enjoyable. And if nothing else, the views of New York are unbeatable...