PERFECTLY NORMAL
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
PERFECTLY NORMAL is a Canadian film directed by Yves Simoneau, produced by Michael Burns, and starring Robbie Coltrane, Michael Riley, Deborah Duchane, and Kenneth Walsh. It is wonderful, funny, fresh, exciting, and completely satisfying.
Alonzo (Robbie Coltrane) is the vast, pushy, sleazy, operatic con-man cum restaurateur who unbidden, unwanted, and irresistible moves in with Renzo (Michael Riley). Renzo is so withdrawn and self-contained as to be almost catatonic, seemingly incapable of doing anything but working by day in a brewery, driving his late father's cab by night, drawing up plans for house he'd probably never build, and playing goalie on the company hockey team (this is a Canadian movie, after all).
Alonzo takes charge of Renzo's life and most certainly brings a weird liveliness to it, as does Deborah Duchane's character, who pretty much has to seduce Renzo and who has one of the funnier bits in a very funny movie when she asks Renzo:
"Are you going to rip my clothes off and ravish me until I talk to God?"
To which he replies: "Something like that."
The movie is populated with several wonderful characters, such as Renzo's "friend" at the brewery, his boss and hockey coach, the coach's girl friend, Deborah Duchane's girl friend (whose sexual fantasies provide us with a kind of leitmotiv throughout), inter alios.
The movie ends with two moments of high magic and a bit in between that I don't understand. Anyone who seen PERFECTLY NORMAL please e-mail me; I have a question I need to ask.
The director of photography was Alain Dostie and the music was by Richard Gregoire. They both deserve high marks indeed. Some wonderful stuff in the brewery and elsewhere and the music through was central to the movie.
Please do yourself a favor and seek out PERFECTLY NORMAL. Ask your art house exhibitor why he/she isn't showing it. In Seattle, it is playing at the Metro Cinema without any visible support, no display ads, no handbills. It deserves and could win a large following. I can imagine the situation being similar elsewhere, if it is shown at all. I think word-of-mouth could build this film into at least an art house success in the U.S. If anybody wants to post or e-mail how it has done in Canada and/or whether it has been distributed in Europe, I would be interested.
(One final word: the film was financed in part by Telefilm Canada and The Ontario Film Development Corp., one more sign of the superior civilization in Canada.)
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews