Rating: R
Genre:
Comedy Drama
Theatrical Release: 04/15/1988(USA)
Release Date: 09/17/2002
SubTitles: English/French/Espanol
Dubbed: English
Sound: DDS
Run Time: 126 Minutes
Flags: Violence, Nudity, Adult Situations, Not For Children, Adult Language
Distributor/Studio: MGM
In the expatriate-littered Paris of the 1920s, painter
Nick Hart (
Keith Carradine) mingles with
Ernest Hemingway (
Kevin O'Connor) and other leading lights of the Lost Generation while palling around with gossip columnist
Oiseau (
Wallace Shawn), whose reportage has helped establish the international reputation of the writers and artists who fled America for France after WWI. Older and less successful than many of his fellow painters,
Hart relies on gallery owner
Libby Valentin (
Genevieve Bujold) to sell what she can of his work while he supports himself drawing cartoons for
Oiseau's weekly column. In a café one day,
Hart spies
Rachel Stone (
Linda Fiorentino) on the arm of her husband,
Bertram (
John Lone), a condom magnate and art patron who's trying to buy his way into society. It seems
Hart and
Rachel share a romantic past of which
Stone is completely unaware. At the salon of writers
Gertrude Stein (
Elsa Raven) and
Alice B. Tolkas (
Ali Giron),
Hart suffers a nasty run-in with the
Stones and meets
Nathalie de Ville (
Geraldine Chaplin), a rich socialite who wants to steal three paintings from her estranged husband.
Nathalie plies
Hart with sexual favors and the promise of cash in exchange for his help in forging copies of the paintings. Although he's loath to follow in the footsteps of his father, a gifted forger,
Hart acquiesces, and soon his rivalry with
Stone and his involvement with the forgeries leads to death, destruction, and scandal in the art world.
Bujold,
Shawn,
Chaplin, and
Carradine are all regular collaborators of iconoclastic director
Alan Rudolph, who filmed
The Moderns in Montréal and would go on to lens the similarly intellectual
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.
~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
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