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Post by tlcarpenter on Jul 17, 2019 6:23:15 GMT
A brash reporter (Rutger Hauer) pretends to have AIDS to elicit reactions from those around him.
The title was changed to On a Moonlit Night at one point, and now imdb has it listed as Up to Date. I remember reading about the making of this film in the New York Times before it was released. Rutger Hauer supposedly was making a behind the scenes documentary but I've never heard about it since the article.
Faye looks gorgeous and the intimate scene between her and Rutger is very stylish.
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Post by nboston81 on Jul 17, 2019 19:23:07 GMT
Such an interesting looking film. I've seen Faye's scenes before but has anybody seen the full film? Is it good? I always wondered what Lorraine Bracco's performance was like. Also am I right that this film never got released in the US? According to IMDB, at least partly it was filmed in January 1989, and had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 1989. Seems to have been released theatrically only in Italy and Argentina, and then in France many years later. (But maybe IMDB info is only partial?)
Anyway, always been curious to know more about this movie. Thanks for sharing these clips.
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Post by tlcarpenter on Jul 19, 2019 3:00:23 GMT
When I finally saw it in the early 2000's (it took over a decade for me to find a copy - a cd-r from Asia with foreign subtitles and the long making out session between Dunaway and Hauer edited out!), I was bitterly disappointed in the film overall. I was so excited when I read about it in 1989. Faye was going to be in a controversial ground breaking AIDS movie, in which she has the disease. You have to remember in 1989 AIDS was still considered a topic too hot to handle with An Early Frost being a rare exception. I just knew this film would be a much talked about event that year with Hauer and Dunaway being the first stars of a film where their characters had the disease and it would elevate Faye even more after the success of BARFLY. Nope. I blame Wertmuller. It was a great plot - Reporter pretends to have AIDS to write an expose on the reaction, then discovers he DOES have it and blackmails a rich CEO (Dunaway) to go into business with him. But Lina didn't do anything with it. Her style seems so stilted, but Hauer has to take some of the blame because he is listed in the opening credits as having written a lot of the dialogue.
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Post by tlcarpenter on Jul 19, 2019 3:06:24 GMT
FILM; LINA WERTMULLER ZEROES IN ON AIDS April 1989 nytimes
What is Lina Wertmuller's next film about? Ask the publicist: ''One of the most potent and controversial topics of our generation.'' Ask the Italian production company: ''A frantic search for truth.'' Ask the leading man, Rutger Hauer: ''A man going through a process of change.'' Ask the director herself: ''The intervention of the media on the delicate human body.'' No one is telling it straight, so read the script: The film is about AIDS.
Miss Wertmuller has tried to hide her film behind a veil of vague phrases for fear it will become branded as ''the AIDS movie.'' To be fair, although AIDS is certainly the hottest issue in the film, it is not the only issue. The film also explores such timeless themes as love, money, marriage and, to use one of the director's favorite phrases, ''the mass neurosis caused by the mass media.'' For two weeks earlier this year, before moving on to Paris, Vienna, London and Rome, the provocative Italian film maker and her international cast grappled with these topics as they began shooting in New York.
High above the city streets, behind the soaring arched windows of One Times Square, Miss Wertmuller's story unfolds. Called ''Crystal or Ash, Fire or Wind, as Long as It's Love'' (Miss Wertmuller has a penchant for long titles; her last film was called ''Summer Night With Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil''), it follows an American reporter in Paris named John.
John, played by Mr. Hauer, is conducting a journalistic experiment, pretending to have AIDS in order to record society's reactions to the illness. His investigation takes an ironic turn when he discovers he may actually be infected with the virus. To protect his wife, Joelle, played by Nastassja Kinski, he flees to New York, where he blackmails the millionaire Mrs. Colber, played by Faye Dunaway, to raise money for AIDS research.
With the help of a translator - and using the acronym AIDS as little as possible - Miss Wertmuller explains why she has spent two and a half years working on this script. As her alto voice flows effusively in Italian. ''I'm surrounded by the facts of life,'' she says. ''And some themes stimulate a story that must be told.'' As concern about AIDS intensified, she was struck by the media's power to mold public perceptions. ''The media can create in two hours disasters or miracles,'' she observes.
Illustrating her point, Miss Wertmuller contends that after word leaked through the press that her film would deal with AIDS, her cameras were shooed away from several New York sidewalks. ''Can there be a greater psychosis?'' she asks, a look of disbelief growing behind her white glasses.
Miss Wertmuller is accustomed to controversy. After the release of ''Swept Away'' and ''Seven Beauties'' in 1975 and 1976, respectively, some critics hailed her as the most exciting and brilliant talent around, while others declared her overrated and perverse. The furor subsided, however, as she produced several critical and box-office flops in a row, including ''A Joke of Destiny'' (1984) and ''Summer Night.'' (1987) These failures, she says, did not persuade her to rethink her brash film-making style. ''My first customer is myself. When I tell a story I like, I can sleep easy. I'm sorry when audiences don't like it, but I have no choice.''
The Italian culture, Miss Wertmuller feels, ''has a predisposition toward creative art.'' Why then, has she left Italy to film in New York? And since she calls her English ''disgusting,'' why is she making her fourth English film? ''The story dictates it. I follow my characters.'' As a reminder of home, she wears two watches: one is set for New York, the other counts the minutes in her native Rome.
The Dutch-born Rutger Hauer, who played a menacing humanoid in ''Blade Runner,'' signed on with Miss Wertmuller more than two years ago and helped shape the script. His cold blue eyes, slicked-back hair and grim expression make him look like the Phantom of the Opera, but he rebuffs the suggestion that he is the quintessential tough. ''I've played three tough guys and 32 other characters,'' he protests. ''This film is a very strong story about love. And I think I know something about that.''
Mr. Hauer is filming a video autobiography to show the public how dreary movie-making can be, but glamour abounds on this set. In the posh penthouse office designed by the director's husband, Enrico Job, Faye Dunaway is perched atop an ebony leather couch, wearing a sleek red dress and killer black heels. As the elegant, wealthy Mrs. Colber, Ms. Dunaway agrees that she is playing to type. ''I was sort of getting away from that,'' she says, most notably in her portrayal of a drunk in ''Barfly.'' ''I'm more interested in playing more natural women. I'm getting kind of bored with glamour. This role is a bit of a throwback.''
In the dressing room next door is another alluring presence, Nastassja Kinski, who communicates with Miss Wertmuller in fluent Italian. Her character, Joelle, fights to stay with John even though he may have AIDS. The film, Ms. Kinski hopes, will convey the message that ''it is absolutely wrong for people who are ill to be isolated. There are ways to live together; you just have to be careful. The only help there is is love. With it there is a life; but without it there isn't.''
Director and stars are known for their fiery temperaments, and because they are shooting the emotional final scenes first, the atmosphere on the set is stormy. First one visitor is kicked out; then a few minutes later, 10 more follow, including the film's Italian producer, Fulvio Lucisano, who paces the floor, staring at his feet. ''The actors are delicate,'' Miss Wertmuller apologizes. Of her own reputation for being tyrannical, she says, ''It's just an impression. I've always been an angel. Sometimes I transform into a witch only because the film making demands it.''
Whether angel or witch, Miss Wertmuller's prime intention is to make a film that is ''close to the first emotion, the first passion that the idea created.'' How many more ideas does she have? ''That I am aware of now, ah, about 150,'' she says, grinning. ''They're all in the magician's hat. Let's see what's pulled out next.''
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Post by tlcarpenter on Jul 19, 2019 3:16:36 GMT
LA TIMES Wertmuller Explores AIDS Love Story By DONALD CHASE FEB. 12, 1989 12 AM
NEW YORK — The scene is being shot in a splendid, eccentric, high-rise office filled with antique hobby horses, Tiffany lamps and bowls of roses, with expansive windows looking down on Times Square. Faye Dunaway and Nastassja Kinski confront each other over the affections of Rutger Hauer with a passion worthy of many intense romantic triangles committed to film. But this one will break new ground for the big screen: Both women are quite aware that Hauer’s character is infected with the AIDS virus--and both women want him.
The film, which began shooting here Jan. 30, is called “Crystal or Ash, Fire or Wind, as Long as It’s Love.” The director is Lina Wertmuller, the petite, bespectacled Italiana whose work includes the provocative, irony-drenched 1970s sociopolitical comedies “Love and Anarchy,” “The Seduction of Mimi,” “Swept Away” and “Seven Beauties.”
Due partly to the element of AIDS in the story line, “As Long as It’s Love” is perhaps a more “serious” Wertmuller film, lacking her trademark irony, which often blurs the line between comedy and drama. But the subject, she declared during a break in shooting, is nonetheless “love, which is the subject of all my movies.”
The director, who has been known to waffle vaporously in interviews, also said that the film deals with “the kind of collective psychosis that can be created today by the terrorizing machine of the mass media.” More specifically, it touches upon “the biggest of the contemporary psychoses": the one surrounding AIDS.
Rutger Hauer is more direct: “It’s a love story, between my character and Nastassja Kinski’s, but a love story needs crisis and conflict, and those are provided here by the fact that my character is an AIDS carrier.” That is, his character has tested positive for the acquired immune deficiency syndrome virus but has not come down with the disease.
The movie’s focus on AIDS was sufficiently off-putting to one major American studio that the producer, Fulvio Lucisano, approached for backing. “They wrote me a letter,” he reported, “saying that it was a beautifully written script, but that they were afraid of it because of AIDS.”
Lucisano eventually secured financing for the project from Italian and French distributor advances. He said it will cost a moderate $6 million to $7 million despite an expensive cast that also includes Peter O’Toole and a schedule that will take it to Paris, Rome, Venice and London between now and early April.
(Meanwhile, AIDS, a viable TV-film subject since “An Early Frost,” three years ago, has yet to be contracted by the protagonist of a Hollywood-financed feature, though just last week producer David Picker announced that the long-delayed “The Normal Heart"--based on Larry Kramer’s angry stage play about the early history of AIDS--is reportedly being prepared for summer filming. In France, the protagonist of Paul Velliacchi’s fall 1988 release “Encore” eventually becomes ill with AIDS.)
Although Wertmuller describes “As Long as It’s Love” as her first “non-ironic” film, it has its ironies. Rutger Hauer’s hero is a Paris-based American magazine writer, or, as the director put it, “an operator within the world of mass media.” He learns of his own AIDS-infected condition after a period of pretending to be infected to gather material for an article on public attitudes about the disease--he takes a job as a dockhand in London, for example, and announces his condition to co-workers. “The reactions vary,” said the actor of characters’ responses to his condition, “but are all pretty much hysterical.”
After his character learns that he is “serio-positive,” Hauer went on, “the film becomes the story of what goes on in your mind when you know that you’re closer to the end of your life than you thought, though you don’t know how close. And how do you live what’s left of your life? I did speak to some people with AIDS who were actually quite close to the end. But mostly I’m relying on what Lina wants to say and on my own imagination.”
One of the first things Wertmuller has the character do is try to determine the source of his infection. In an early version of the script, Hauer reported, “there was a link to bisexuality. But Lina took that out because she felt it was almost too much on the money, too easy.” In the shooting script, the transmission is heterosexual.
Hauer’s character also gives up journalism, and out of a combination of fear, shame and denial leaves his colleague/lover Kinski and their young daughter, to return to New York. There, he persuades the head of a pharmaceutical company specializing in baby products (Dunaway) to diversify into condom manufacturing--and to funnel the profits from this operation into AIDS education and research. In the course of this, he begins an affair with Dunaway’s character, who is also infected with the deadly virus.
In addition to the magnet of Wertmuller, whom she called “a great film stylist,” Dunaway was also drawn to the project because of its AIDS aspect. The actress’s voice, ordinarily so richly expressive, became flat and sad as she related that “one old friend has died of AIDS and three or four others are now ill.”
Though Dunaway’s role is relatively brief, requiring only a week’s shooting, she said that “the work was equally intense as the work I’ve done for longer roles. I spoke to friends who are active in research and raising money for AIDS; I spoke to groups for women who have tested positive, which is a relatively new thing; I read Susan Sontag’s book, ‘AIDS and Its Metaphors.’ ”
Wertmuller, too, has read Sontag. “She says some beautiful things,” she said.
Sontag’s thesis is that the vocabulary (e.g., the word plague ) used by the media and, consequently, the public in discussing AIDS creates a hopelessness among persons with AIDS by suggesting that their condition is a kind of retribution for immoral behavior.
In fact, Wertmuller’s view--which may have influenced her to change the source of her protagonist’s infection--is similar.
“Somehow the mass media have made it into a biblical condemnation of freedom of choice and style of life. Even if I think that the constrictions, the rules around the game of love are very erotic. . . . I cannot accept or suggest that this disease is a damnation of God for those who are free lovers.”
The film takes pains to brand as absurd the idea advanced by European “hard” Greens, or extremist environmentalists, that AIDS is a form of natural population control.
Though this last is apparently a fairly recent notion, the film, which takes place between 1986 and 1989, views the AIDS crisis as becoming more optimistic over time. “The movie is on the sunny side of the street,” is how Wertmuller puts it.
Part of this has to do with Wertmuller’s belief in the redemptive power of love--Kinski’s for Hauer in this case. “It’s also a question of them both accepting their responsibilities toward each other,” Kinski said. “I think you feel that some sort of life, however long it will be, is possible for them.”
And some part of it comes from the director’s view of history and of humankind. “As ugly as our times may be,” Wertmuller commented, “they’re still the least ugly in the history of humanity. Because the so-called beautiful old times were a long tragedy of pain, sorrow and injustice. So man is becoming better--though the price for that is that he has at his disposal the means for his own self-destruction.
“But I am an optimist--even though I say sometimes I’m an optimist terrorized.”
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Post by tlcarpenter on Jul 19, 2019 4:10:06 GMT
Here's the complete film. I just watched it. I liked it better this time - interesting film. But my expectations were no longer high so... Lorraine Bracco appears at 104:34
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Post by nboston81 on Jul 19, 2019 14:43:26 GMT
Thanks so much for sharing the full film and all those great articles from back when it was released. I'll have a look at all of it this weekend.
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Post by nboston81 on Jul 24, 2019 16:56:58 GMT
The lead actor, Rutger Hauer, died today, aged 75. Good time to revisit this film soon. Thanks again for posting, I hope to watch it in the next few days.
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Post by tlcarpenter on Jul 24, 2019 20:53:36 GMT
Rest in Peace Rutger Hauer
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