Cinema: Short Takes: Afterglow

Phyllis (Julie Christie) is sad. A former horror-film star, she spends her days watching her old movies on cassette and brooding about her runaway daughter. Her husband Lucky (Nick Nolte) is...well, lucky--a handyman with plenty of randy women for clients. Marianne (Lara Flynn Boyle) is one of them, feverish with desire for the baby her financier husband Jeffrey (Jonny Lee Miller) is too preoccupied to provide.

The women--one mourning a lost child, the other yearning to have one--offer mirror images of the mothering instinct. The men--a working stiff grabbing furtive pleasure on the fly and an executive taking stupid risks (Jeffrey likes to tiptoe along balustrades high above the street)--reflect, in their class-differentiated ways, the contemporary male's desperate need for adventure. But Afterglow's writer-director, Alan Rudolph, is not entirely certain whether temporarily mixing and rematching these couples is a funny idea or a poignant one.

There's some door-slamming farce in his film and a certain amount of romantic rue as well. Christie has already won prizes for the knowing weariness of her performance, and Flynn Boyle probably deserves some for her ferociously stated frustrations. But their clarity can't quite cut through the thickness of the film's air or compensate for the wooziness it induces.

--By Richard Schickel