![]() ![]() Rudolph’s screenplay feels like a Raymond Carver short story in how much it tells you by leaving almost everything out. We learn everything about these two, and also nothing. It doesn’t take too long for these two to get up to their old tricks, at which point Remember My Name becomes an even more enticingly oblique experience. What a pair Chaplin and Perkins make together - they’re all sinewy, awkward angles and antsy energy. It turns out Neil and Emily used to be married, way back before she wound up in the slammer. ![]() The songs unite all these sniping, disparate characters under the same downhearted cloud, their misery making beautiful music. The soundtrack is comprised entirely of old blues tunes sung by Alberta Hunter, who had recently made a return to the stage, well into her 80s. People are constantly snapping at each other in ways Rudolph can’t help but find unaccountably funny. ![]() It’s basically a running joke that every bit player in the movie is having a terrible day, with bartenders, store clerks and anyone else we encounter worn down to their very last nerve. There’s something almost wistful about it. For all its foreboding and mysterious motives, Remember My Name somehow doesn’t come off as a particularly unpleasant or mean-spirited movie. There’s a lot of obvious overlap in their regular ensembles and production crews, yet Rudolph’s sensibility is significantly less spiky than that of his mentor, more indulgent of his characters’ quirks and idiosyncrasies. Sort of.Īlan Rudolph started out as an assistant director to Robert Altman on The Long Goodbye, California Split and Nashville before Altman began producing Rudolph’s own directorial efforts with Welcome To L.A. Her stalking of Neil soon escalates to terrorizing his wife Barbara (played by Perkins’ real-life spouse Berry Berenson) and it’s more than halfway through the picture before we finally find out why. Chaplin is mesmerizing, exhibiting a ferocious single-mindedness amid sudden bursts of violence with which she seems to surprise even herself. It seems as if she’s been rehearsing them for some time – maybe even 12 years – and she’s going to say them now whether you’re listening or not. She has a way of spitting out her words in sudden torrents. We can’t be sure what exactly Emily is up to, or why she’s flirting with her apartment building’s super (Moses Gunn) and making weird requests for stuff like an extra security lock for the front door. This is not a sentiment shared by shift supervisor Rita (Alfre Woodard), who has seen too many lost causes like Emily come and go. Nudd has a soft spot for his mom’s charity cases. Played by an impossibly young and spindly Jeff Goldblum, the marvelously named Mr. She gets a job working the register at a local department store run by her old cellmate’s son. We eventually put together that Emily has recently been released from prison after serving 12 years for a crime the movie is in no hurry to tell us about. Written and directed by Alan Rudolph, 1978’s Remember My Name is a tantalizing, elliptical affair with about as many empty spaces as the house that Neil and his crew aren’t exactly exhausting themselves to fill. She lights one off the end of the other while she watches Neil. She’s played by Geraldine Chaplin in a performance of jangled nerves, anxious energy and endless cigarettes. He’s being spied on by a woman named Emily. (As if Anthony Perkins could fit in anywhere?) We watch Neil from a remove. That’s how we first get used to seeing Anthony Perkins’ Neil Curry, a leather-jacketed day laborer who doesn’t seem to quite fit in with the other fellas. Workers walk freely through big gaps where walls are soon to be, but looked at from a certain angle – particularly in the crushed, telephoto compositions of cinematographer Tak Fujimoto – the structure can resemble the bars of a prison. The construction site that serves as a central location in Remember My Name is a wooden skeleton of a house. ![]()
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