THE ODD COUPLE

By Stanley Kauffmann

From New Republic, vol 207 n 5, 07.27.1992

Is there an angel of cinema Up Above? He/she works only part-time, I'd guess, but that angel must exist. How else explain the marvelous juxtaposition this week? Two fantasies appear side by side -- one realistic, one grotesque; one small-scale, one huge; both (as fantasies must be) the reifications of longings and fears in ourselves that we may or may not be aware of. How could this pairing have been accidental?

The small-scale one is The Hairdresser's Husband (Triton), and let's state up front, as film folk say, that it's pretty largely a sexual-gratification fantasy for males. Women have said that they find it erotic, but they've also said they know that, in a way, they are gender-slumming.

This French film was directed by Pierre Leconte, who made Monsieur Hire, and was written by him and Claude Klotz. A 12-year-old boy's erotic imaginings are stimulated by a bosomy, sexy-smelling woman barber whom he visits every week. He determines that some day he will marry a woman barber. (Not a hairdresser, as the title says, but a woman who barbers only men.) "Some day" turns out to be middle age. By the time he meets her, he is played by Jean Rochefort (born 1930). She is in her 20s, Anna Galiena.

Much of the fantasy is in the very way they meet and marry. Rochefort has lived in this seaside town all his life, yet has never been in this shop before. He proposes marriage suddenly while he is in Galiena's chair for the first time. She says nothing. When he returns for another cut a few weeks later, she accepts him. Believe all that and you're ready for what follows.

We never learn what Rochefort did for a living, but he obviously doesn't do it anymore. He sits in the small shop, watching his wife barber customers. She is quite content with this arrangement because she is mad about him and because she wants as much of his adoration, physical or not, as she can get. Privacy is not always needed: he fondles her intimately when a customer has his eyes shut for a shampoo.

That little barber shop becomes a steaming pit of sensuality, its escape hatch the small apartment directly above. Leconte emphasizes the steaminess by filming the shop, where most of the story takes place, in wide-screen. The large expanse for the narrow space intensifies the heat. Sustaining the swoon level is Michael Nyman's score, which floats underneath like later-day Debussy, interrupted only by the Arab phonograph records to which Rochefort likes to dance.

Rochefort is one of those rare actors who are past question. Whatever else may be true of him in a role, we're going to believe him. Credibility is where he starts; so, in this film, he never seems too old for his behavior. Galiena knows how to simmer quietly, and also, in her fears that he may cease to care for her, she knows how to be touching.

The story ends with death, which echoes an earlier death in the film. Death has kept sexual happiness from dwindling in films by Oshima and AlmodOvar, among others. For Leconte, that death is made tristfully complimentary to the male. Add, too, that the 12-year-old's yearnings are reprised throughout the story, and The Hairdresser's Husband becomes the completion of a juvenile dream, which finishes without further obligations for the man.

Vis-a-vis reality, the reality of life and of love -- love as something more than (not other than) sexual bliss -- Leconte's film is silly. But as a dramatized daydream, it seduces.

Next to it put another dramatized daydream, Batman Returns (Warner Bros.). Adolescent fantasies of superhuman power, of transformations, of modest world-shaking heroism, even of penetrating animals' secrets -- all the commonplaces of comic books again get here a billion-dollar massage.

Women viewers didn't seem perceptibly slighted by the 1989 Batman; still, gender ecumenism has arrived. No. 2 has a woman wonder-worker alongside the hero. Michelle Pfeiffer plays a nerd of a secretary (assistant, she insists) who decides to revenge herself on her would-be murderer, and on other vermin, by becoming Catwoman. How this nerd becomes an athletic heroine who would make Olympic gymnasts gape and where she gets her paraphernalia are only two of the questions that this picture was created not to answer.

Like its predecessor, this isn't a film, it's a display -- of action episodes and, chiefly, of production design. The plot doesn't matter, which is a good thing because it's murky. Batman is the bland Bruce Wayne, played by the bland Michael Keaton; and he is joined, to his surprise, by Catwoman. Quasi-sympathetic is a man-bird called Penguin, played by Danny DeVito in a mask and padding. The chief heavy is Christopher Walken, notable here for only two reasons. He has reached the point in his career where he can have a grown son; and his character's name is Max Shreck. Not only does Shreck -- spelled Schreck -- mean fright or terror in German, but someone has been looking into film history: in Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), the title role, a vampire, was played by an actor named Max Schreck.

The first Batman was designed by Anton Furst in a manner reminiscent of Lang's Metropolis (1926). Furst had started work on the second Batman when he committed suicide. Tim Burton, who directed both films, then engaged Bo Welch, who had designed Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice for him, and instructed Welch to discard Furst's sketches. On its own, Welch's work is less impressive. The new picture seems a collection of bizarre sets rather than a whole weird city in the toils of a miasma.

But Welch's city shares one characteristic with Furst's: it stands indoors. There is no sky. We're meant to see, or feel, that all the exteriors were shot in a studio. This is important because it makes the film seem to be happening on an immense game board, in which the shootings and explosions and fires are moves in an outsize tourney.

The result is only partially grim. Mostly it's as if high school kids had made a film -- talented, financed by big banks rather than piggy banks, but nonetheless kids. Some of the most successful films of our time were made that way -- by George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Burton, who were faithful to the adolescence in themselves and touched similar, possibly dormant areas in many millions of people around the globe.

Anyway, that cinema angel, who obviously has a sense of humor, enjoyed bringing these two fantasies along in the same week.