MAKE A DATE WITH LOVE

By Janet Maslin

From The New York Times, 10.04.1992

For dating couples who would like to see their hopes and fears reflected on the screen, here's a recommendation. Go see a double feature of Cameron Crowe's Singles and Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives and telescope 20 or 30 years' worth of romantic travails into one eye-opening evening.

Mr. Crowe is not Mr. Allen--his film is much lighter and bouncier--but the connection between the two films is real. Their formats are similar, and to a surprising extent they have the same matters in mind. The differences are those of age, outlook and experience, which brings up another recommendation: see these films in what may seem to be reverse order, with the middle-aged Husbands and Wives first. That way, the ebullient Singles can send you home humming its theme song ("Dyslexic Heart," by Paul Westerberg of the Replacements--catchy but markedly different from Mr. Allen's favorite, Gershwin). If you end the evening with the terminal despair of Husbands and Wives, you may find yourself wanting to break up other things, too.

The generational gap between these two films can be summed up with a single article of clothing. Plaid flannel shirts look great on the pert, hopeful twentysomething women who wear them around Seattle in Singles, women who drink water on dates and have jobs like environmentalist or coffee house waitress. But the same shirts look dowdy in Husbands and Wives on Mia Farrow's Judy, who is two decades older, well established, unhappily married (though she doesn't yet know it) and living in New York.

Each of these films, incidentally, has its distinct sense of urban chic, whether expressed through posters and slogans on the sets of Singles or the more upscale, rarefied decor of Husbands and Wives. Each film is highly selective about such backdrops, using only the well-chosen minor players and precise details that its director wants the audience to see.

Each film is also set up as a quasi documentary, so that characters can tell the camera things they won't tell one another. And each follows a handful of well-defined characters who brood endlessly about the difficulties of romantic love. But the ones in Singles have only begun casting about for some kind of permanence. ("Somewhere around 25," observes Bridget Fonda's enchanting Singles character, "bizarre becomes immature.") Their long-married counterparts in Mr. Allen's film are so ready to sever domestic ties that when they wind up together (as one couple manages to do), this does not constitute a happy ending.

In Husbands and Wives, Mr. Allen plays a famous writer named Gabe, one of whose short stories is entitled "The Gray Hat." "Giving up one's hopes, compromising one's dreams is like putting on a gray hat," quotes Rain (Juliette Lewis), the young student who expresses her admiration for Gabe's work by trying to seduce him. Gray hats are everywhere in Husbands and Wives, as the characters drink too much, tell half-truths and occasionally lash out at one another. "You use sex to express every emotion except love," Judy tells Gabe angrily during one of their many quarrels.

Singles is set well before the gray hat stage, but compromise is still an issue. In their first attempts to settle down, its characters have to decide just how badly they want to accommodate one another. A funny, deceptively casual subplot involving Ms. Fonda has her contemplating a breast enlargement operation to please her not-quite-boyfriend, the hilariously dim rock musician played by Matt Dillon. Real concerns about her identity and self-worth are not obscured by the ostensible silliness of the episode.

Singles is serious in understanding how scary and tempting the idea of change for change's sake can be, especially during one's 20's, and how much newly independent young people both want and fear commitment. "Don't do this to me; don't make me remember this chili dog forever!" wails one of the film's heroines, when her nervous suitor suddenly proposes marriage.

A couple of decades later, in Husbands and Wives, new experience is no longer easy, and it has thus become wildly desirable. So the two long-married couples in the film yearn for adventure, no matter what the cost. Mr. Allen has a lot of fun with the way Sydney Pollack's guilty, henpecked husband finds happiness with a bubble-brained blond aerobics instructor. ("I flip over couscous!" declares Lysette Anthony, very amusing in this role, when it is suggested she have dinner in a Mexican restaurant.) If Mr. Allen's film is ever successfully separated from the media furor that surrounds it, it will be seen as a thoughtful exploration of why smart, enlightened, self-aware men in their 50's--men like Mr. Allen and so many of his fellow cultural heroes--begin behaving as they do.

Meanwhile, at Mr. Crowe's stage of the game, optimism has not died. And it remains as unexpectedly funny as it is when handled by Mr. Allen. "Being alone--there's a certain dignity to it," muses Ms. Fonda's newly separated character, as she suns herself on her roof. The detail is not overemphasized, but in fact, she has brought her telephone outdoors with her, just in case. In the world of Singles, where a dating video made by a would-be film maker includes a quick parody of the Psycho shower scene, the search for love is a risky business. In Husbands and Wives, the stakes are higher and the risks different, but some things never change.