LIANNA
(USA, 1983)
(Film notes by the Dartmouth Film Society)
(Copyright 1988, Dartmouth Film Society)
Lianna............................................LINDA GRIFFITHS Ruth................................................JANE HALLAREN Dick..................................................JON DEVRIES Sandy................................................JO HENDERSON Theda.....................................JESSICA WIGHT MACDONALD Spencer.............................................JESSE SOLOMON Jerry ................................................JOHN SAYLES Sheila...............................................MAGGIE RENZI
A United Artists release of a Winwood Company Production. Produced by JEFFREY NELSON, and MAGGIE RENZI. Music by MASON DARRING. Camera by AUSTIN DE BECHE. Written, edited, and directed by JOHN SAYLES. (110 minutes).
To a degree impossible for most films, LIANNA was shaped by its director, who also wrote, acted in, and edited the film. The background of that man, John Sayles, perhaps explains part of the uniqueness of this film. Most importantly, he began his creative career not in film but as a prize-winning author of short stories and novels. In the late 1970's he transferred his talents to witty and skillful screenplays, and in 1980 demonstrated his control over the entire film-making process through the success of his first film, RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS 7, which he produced on a budget of only $60,000.
Three years later, Sayles produced LIANNA on a comparatively generous but still small budget of $300,000. In this film, Sayle's title character (Linda Griffiths) is the uneasily married wife of a junior university professor, whom she dropped out of college to marry. At thirty-three, Lianna is beginning to reevaluate the direction her life is taking. She is, after all, an unhappy woman with two children (Spencer and Theda), no job, and a husband who warmly interacts with not one but several student bodies! In a move towards self-fulfillment, Lianna takes a child psychology course with a visiting professor, Ruth (Jane Halleren). The two become increasingly close and, with Ruth's encouragement, eventually have an affair. When Lianna admits to her husband that she has had an affair, Dick reacts with indifferent disdain. But when she adds that the affair was with a woman, Dick becomes self-righteous and accusing. He finds it a convenient excuse to alienate himself and the children from the wife whom he feels betrayed him sexually. Lianna's new life, defined internally by her choice of sexual independence, but externally by damaging societal judgements, is nearly as painful and complicated as her previous one. Her women friends are ambivalent or reject her, her adolescent children barely understand, and these conflicts are only partly reconciled.
The aspect of the film that drew the most comment from critics was its style, or lack thereof. Sayles seems to consider the content of his story as being essentially independent of the film-making techniques used to tell it, an attitude perhaps stemming from Sayle's background as an author, rather than as a director. Stanley Kaufmann in The New Republic remarked, "The most disturbing element in Sayle's work is the suspicion that his intelligence and power of social observation satisfy him, and make cinematic fluency secondary to him." But the majority of the reviews, while making such observations, tempered their criticism by noting that, in an interesting way, this lack of gloss adds rather than detracts from the film's realism. David Ansen of Newsweekwrote: "Sayle's scruffy, anti-style does take some getting used to: initially, the home-movie veracity seems downright amateurish. What's more, Sayles isn't half as dextrous with his camera as he is is with his dialogue. But eventually the characters simply win you over, and the tale takes priority over its sometimes clumsy telling."
Sayles neglects Hollywood's technical values and emphasizes characters, dialogue, and story (all characteristics of a good novel) in a winning combination. While this naturalistic, low-keyed interplay concentrates on credible personal dynamics, it fails to deliver a dramatic peak. Some critics found Sayles' "slice-of-life" tone overly neutral and dull. However, Richard Corliss of TIME found that this avoidance of the dramatique created a social comedy which, like its heroine, continually discovers "resources of wit and self-confidence."
Interestingly, the film's treatment of lesbianism met with a favorable response from main-stream publications, but opposition from magazines on opposite ends of the political spectrum. MS magazine complained that the film glossed over several of the essential qualities of lesbianism: "LIANNA evades the deeper, more perilous feelings a "real" Lianna would experience and provoke... Lianna soars awfully quickly into the light and delight. Her overnight passage into gay life is comparatively free from sexual fumbling, qualms, and guilt." The conservative New Republic could find no explanation for her decision to tell her husband, nor for his lack of understanding after she had "pushed the facts in his face."
Despite its shortcomings, LIANNA offers valuable insight into an alternative lifestyle, and shows how that choice affects others. It is the unique traits of Sayles as a novelist that allow this "richly detailed network" to be created, and it is those unique traits that give the film both its strengths and its weaknesses.
-- Phil Bogle and Manjari Wijenaike
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