LOVING JEZEBEL
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Shooting Gallery Director: Kwyn Bader Writer: Kwyn Bader Cast: Andre B. Blake, Elisa Donovan, Hill Harper, Laurel Holloman, Sandrine, Holt, David Moscow, Nicole Parker, Phylicia Rashad
Freud once threw up his arms in frustration and said, "What do women want?" The most incisive answer usually given by people who know women or at least have seen hundreds of romances on the screen is that women want men who can make them laugh. This is valid. What Kwyn Bader may be adding to that in his quirky little fluff of a comedy, "Loving Jezebel," is, surprisingly enough, that women want men who love women. Bader does not, of course, mean that a woman wants her man to be looking at every pretty sight that passes in the street, but there is a difference between an egotistical Lothario and a basically healthy guy who genuinely likes, repeat, genuinely likes, the opposite sex.
The idiosyncratic but otherwise normal fellow in this film, Theodorus Melville (Hill Harper), turned out OK despite his having an irritating mom, Alice (Phylicia Rashad) who often does her best to convert her vigorous son into a mixed-up dude with an unresolved Oedipal conflict. In the one scene that can give audience members the willies, she asks the young man not to go out on a date but to stay home with her- -as she sits beside him on the sofa and holds his hand.
The women he dates are, like the mom, all eccentric, but not a one is really irritating. This is part of what raises "Loving Jezebel" well above yet another 20-something sitcom with a plodding narration. Bader opens the movie toward the end of the story as the delightfully confused and paradoxically focussed Theo races grabs a coat and almost literally flies out the back door just a few paces ahead of a gun-toting man, Gabe Parks (David Moscow), whose wife Samantha (Laurel Holloman) has been seeing Theo behind Gabe's back. To explain the background of his plight, Theo, with heavy use of narration, takes us back to his kindergarten class where he is smitten for the first time with a girl who soon ditches him for another man. As he moves up the grades to Brooklyn's wonderful school, Poly Prep (my alma mater) and then to Columbia College, Theo has unusual flings with a plethora of women who all sense that the man genuinely loves their gender, causing troubles as well with the men he befriends throughout his school years. Yet all the women are using him as an interim boy friend (oh, the delights of being used), including one with a fetish for stuffed Winnies the Pooh (Elisa Donovan); the cultured Trinidadian, Mona (Sandrine Holt)' and nicest of all the unhappily married poet, Samantha (Laurel Holloman)--who is the only one in Theo's life who genuinely loves him.
Kwyn Bader, using his own screenplay, has created a work that will remind any moviegoer of Woody Allen and Spike Lee, as his central character exhibits both the anxieties of Mr. Allen (as in "Small Time Crooks") and the congenial assertiveness of Spike Lee in the role of Mars in that director's funky 1986 film "She's Gotta Have It." One of the whimsical scenes has Theo chasing after Frances (Nicole Ari Parker) on the college campus--which mimicking Mars's plea to a girl, "Please baby, please baby, please baby."
The breeziness of the relationships is matched by some sharp writing, as when Samantha counsels Theo, "You loved all these women--except maybe the one with the Winnie dolls," sewing up her case by telling Theo that "You loved that elusive part that allows them to follow their passions, the part that wants understanding and tenderness." This is a surprisingly refreshing comedy.
Rated R. Running time: 85 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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