Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

[note: cut-lines hide potential spoilers]

Maybe it was the reward of virtue (in a roundabout way), but if I hadn't (finally!) offered to take my senior citizen neighbor (who has bad arthritis and no car) to the supermarket Wednesday night, I wouldn't have taken the time to read this week's movie listings in the free newspaper (while waiting for my neighbor to finish her shopping) or have realized that there was a movie called That Touch of Pink which would be leaving town after just one more day.

Thus it happened that I managed to get myself down to the theater just in time to catch the early afternoon showing on Thursday. I remembered my sister had said that she'd missed this film when it was in Milwaukee (in and out of town in a single week), and I hadn't heard anything else about it, but the description in the paper made it a definite 'must-see' for me.

Picture this: Kyle MacLachlan (putting his chin to good use) as the Spirit of Cary Grant, helping a young, gay, Muslim man in London find true love and self-understanding.

It was utterly charming and heart-warming, contriving to be at least as funny as Down With Love (which also referenced a lot of Doris Day romantic comedies from the 1950's and '60's, as this film clearly does with the Cary Grant/Doris Day comedy That Touch of Mink, among others), without having to be so brittle and self-consciously artificial. It may sound odd to say that it's not really artificial, when talking about a movie that features a phantom Cary-Grant-as-seen-through-his-movie-roles who can only be seen and heard by the young man he's advising, but trust me, in the context of That Touch of Pink, the ghostly Cary Grant seems quite understandable and even necessary.

I recognized some supporting actors from Canadian-made T.V. shows (for instance, the father of Giles, domestic partner of our hero Alim, is played by 'David Banning' from "Codename: Eternity", and the hot ex-school-chum and champion swimmer is played by Dean McDermott, who used to be on "due South" quite a bit). But most of the cast were unknown to me, or only vaguely familiar, and I thought they all did a bang-up job.

No character was completely unlikable or completely innocent or blind -- a nicely complex view of an extended family who love each other even as they drive each other crazy, much of the time. The scenes in which Alim's mother starts to open up and bond, reluctantly and unknowingly, with Alim's lover Giles are just adorable.

Moreoever, the ways in which "Cary Grant" (who's just a compendium of all the movie characters that the real Cary Grant once played) substitutes for Alim's dead father and absent mother (Grant's old movies are quite literally 'mother's milk' to Alim, just as certain movies and T.V. shows have been to me, I thought) are apparent early on. Not until quite late in the film do we realize that Alim's 'distant' mother was once just as deeply invested in those films as Alim has been, but that her attempt to lose herself in the persona of "Doris Day" wounded her perhaps even more deeply than it wounded Alim. Fascinating stuff!

Some aspects of the movie were certainly reminiscent (for me, at least) of Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (the pretense at heterosexuality when the 'old world' parent shows up, and the pressures to get married and produce grandchildren), but the phantom Cary Grant conceit allowed this film to go deeper into the roots of complicated family relationships and individual iconography.

A very good job by all involved!

I followed up that 'gay romp' by seeing the last 95 minutes of The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, about which I'd heard nothing, but I was curious about it. Zatoichi had already started by the time Touch of Pink ended, but I knew that it was leaving town the next day, as well, and that I wouldn't be coming back to the multiplex for any late evening shows, so better to come into the movie ten or twenty minutes late than not to see it at all, I reasoned.

The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi included much wildly spurting blood, some moderate cross-dressing, and a grand finale which had the entire population of a 19th-century Japanese village furiously tap-dancing in wooden sandles like a cross between "Riverdance" and a Busby Berkeley extravaganza from the 1940's.

It was really weird on one level (flashbacks and current events all mixed together and bleeding into one another), but fascinating and occasionally quite funny, as well.

It was also occasionally deeply tragic and touching, as when a little brother decides to prostitute himself in order to get enough money for his young sister and himself to survive on, while his sister (who's only a child herself, but has tried hard to protect him, since their home and security had been so brutally taken from them) can only tearfully accept the money as the incredibly costly and heart-breaking gift of love that it is.

So, two very different but fascinating movies. And I'd heartily recommend Touch of Pink, especially, for anyone.