One reason I was so enthusiastic about Azazel Jacobs’s The Lovers, one of my favorite movies of 2017, was that it reminded me of the work of writer-director Alan Rudolph. Employing funny, literate dialogue and graceful camera movements, Jacobs created a heightened sense of reality in which it seemed natural for people to fall in love on a whim. This effect, and the means Jacobs used to achieve it, seemed straight out of the Rudolph playbook, something few filmmakers have bothered to consult since he stopped making movies in the early 2000s. (Rudolph ended his 15-year silence last year with the indie feature Ray Meets Helen; unfortunately no one in Chicago bothered to screen it, but it’s now available to watch online.) I’ve often wondered why that is—Rudolph’s distinctive blend of screwball comedy, film noir-style purple dialogue, and musical-like visuals yielded so many memorable movies (among them Choose Me, Trouble in Mind, The Moderns, and Love at Large) that I’m surprised no one tried to rip it off. A few 21st-century films have come close to achieving what Rudolph did in his winning streak of 80s and 90s—The Lovers, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love—but what makes them successfully Rudolphesque is the way they follow their own intuition. Perhaps Rudolph’s work is simply inimitable.
The film is full of such stylistic curlicues, from the consistent wordplay to the attractive images of Montreal’s architecture. (One virtue of Rudolph’s filmography is the way it relishes the flavors of cities one doesn’t often encounter in movies—consider how much mileage the director gets from Seattle in Trouble in Mind.) And then there’s the charm Rudolph elicits from his cast; the acting here sparkles like it did in Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s. All four leads are as self-consciously effervescent as the narrative contrivances, and they deliver Rudolph’s dialogue with an appropriate mix of artifice and candor. There’s a wonderful exchange between Boyle and Christie that occurs late in Afterglow whose effect is almost impossible to transcribe. “Is it true what they say about the laboring classes?” Phyllis asks Marianne after they meet. “Did [Lucky] give you everything you need?” “He’s the most sexual man I’ve ever met,” the younger woman responds. “Really. How many men have you met?” Marianne reflects for a moment, letting anticipation build, until she finally says, “Two.”
