Smooth Talk

(Joyce Chopra, USA, 1985)

Smooth Talk is one short, stunning movie nested inside a longer, less interesting one. I first viewed it on VHS (it was a video shop staple) back in the mid-to-late ‘80s, and at that time it carried a charge among the modest but significant wave of B budget teen movies (and thriller or horror films) directed by women – a ‘post feminist’ (hold that phone!) period in cinema history that many have overlooked, or simply know little-to-nothing about today. Penelope Spheeris was the undisputed Queen of the Scene back then, but many others – Kathryn Bigelow, Joan Freeman, Kristine Peterson, Marina Sargenti – were getting to make good stuff within variously comical, poignant and visceral pop genres.

In that period, I mentally placed Joyce Chopra, who had her roots in social (and particularly feminist) documentary of the 1960s and ‘70s, into another, neighbouring group of names: slightly more mainstream figures, nonetheless also scrambling for whatever they could get to do in the ‘80s and ‘90s, such as Martha Coolidge, Susan Seidelman, Allison Anders, Nancy Savoca, and even Diane Keaton (whose tele-fiction-debut Wildflower [1991] is a gem).

Meanwhile, Bette Gordon, Lizzie Borden, Beth B and others traced another related, no less precarious, more militantly new-wave-feminist path from avant-garde/underground experimentation into feature narrative. Many of these people, from all the sub-categories, are still struggling to get projects happening today in the era of streaming.

Smooth Talk returned to wide circulation in 2020 – a full 35 years after its minor cult (mainly word-of-mouth) fame on VHS. At that precise point, it was drawn into the odd whirlpool of a post Me-Too scanning (reading would be too generous a description) … or, the scariest word of the moment, a historic reckoning.

Suddenly, the entire movie got flattened into one killer question: was Connie (a teenage Laura Dern) raped by the sinister, older, James Dean-like seducer Arnold (Treat Williams, 1951-2023) … or did they just go for a drive? Although even Chopra herself today flatly describes Arnold as a “rapist”, the film itself not only leaves the question open, via an enigmatic transition and ellipse, but appears not even to pose the question in those specific, loaded terms. It could be that, after all, they simply (or complexly) ‘had sex’, without further goading or coercion on the guy’s part. Connie does have an interest (aka agency) in the matter!

Dern, too, has moved from stating, in 1990, that Connie merely went for a drive, and was furthermore metaphorically “in the driver’s seat”, to (in 2020) siding more with the rape interpretation. In the 2021 book (Fireflies Press Decadent Edition) nominally about Inland Empire (2006), but mainly about Dern, Melissa Anderson asks herself (in several variations): “Why do I flinch at the thought of Dern re-analysing the complex, ambiguous Smooth Talk – a film filled with uncertainties that she, 18 when the film was released, once embraced – to fit a current orthodoxy that seems so often to insist on sexual relations, at least those between women and men, as the ‘seedbed for trauma’?” (p. 73). Good question!

We are here speaking of the shorter, stunning part of Smooth Talk: the long, carefully choreographed mise en scène of Arnold trying to lure Connie out of her (otherwise unpeopled) home and into his weird-looking car (in which also sits a very disturbed-looking, silent male pal). The spectacle anticipates the more (ahem) triggering passage of Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake (1991) in which crim Max (Robert De Niro) runs through all his sleazy-charming moves on teenage Danielle (Juliette Lewis), who responds with every imaginable palpitation and tremor – fear and desire entwined, as it is for Connie.

However, Smooth Talk tends to be paired, these days, with the turgid reckoning-harbinger The Tale (Jennifer Fox, 2018, also starring Dern), rather than the action-thriller Cape Fear. Draw your own conclusions!

Chopra’s film starts somewhere else, and deliberately so. Judging by the font of the credits, the smooth combo sound “under the musical direction of James Taylor” (short-story-source author Joyce Carol Oates judged this score to be “wonderfully appropriate … the music of [Connie’s] spiritual being”), and the standard establishing shots of a typical American town, its pure telemovie/American Playhouse/Sundance Institute fare of the mid ‘80s. Humanist, heartwarming, family-based, all that. But not at the level, in this mode, of, say, Robert Mulligan’s sublime The Man in the Moon (1991) – or Wildflower.

To some good extent, Chopra clearly intends this initial ambience to be deceiving, or at least to serve as a tool of indirection – a way to slowly arrive at the final 30 minutes (plus back-at-home coda). Maybe a little too slowly; you have to commit yourself, as a viewer, to hang in with it. Arnold is first flagged as a looming presence 22 minutes in, outside a bar, but Tom Cole’s script works through an assortment of young guys, nerdy and macho, before the fireworks can really begin. (Cole, who died in 2009, was Chopra’s husband and frequent collaborator. Their story, and many others, is told in Chopra’s excellent 2022 memoir Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television and Beyond [City Lights].)

The naturalistic part has its charms, too. Mary Kay Place plays some pained, difficult, frustrated moments as Connie’s mother, Katherine – and there’s a superb cut from Connie dancing along to her record player (Taylor’s “Handy Man”, naturally!) to Mom, on her lonesome, also soulfully swaying; this could have been somewhere in Kent Jones’ mind when he staged Place’s jukebox dance scene in the under-seen and underrated Diane (2018). Levon Helm of The Band has a pleasant, laid-back turn as the father – and the domestic setting, an eternal house-in-the-process-of-being-fixed, is well integrated into the familial dramas.

Then there’s all the teen hang-out stuff – with its emphasis on a trio of girls looking, laughing, flirting, mooching around, going to the cinema … and its extension into some heavier moments between Connie and her seemingly family-favoured sister, June (Elizabeth Berridge), including an impressive mobile, long-take discussion in a bedroom – a scene that ends (not long before Arnold’s arrival) with the rude turn of June’s declaration: “What a little bitch you are”. (The harsh judgmental words of both June and Katherine find a disconcerting echo in Oates’ own appraisal of her central, and to her ‘allegorical’, character: “An innocent young girl is seduced by her own vanity; she mistakes death for erotic romance of a particularly American/trashy sort […] That Connie’s fate is so trashy is in fact her fate […] A girl’s coming-of-age that involves her succumbing to, but then rejecting, the ‘trashy dreams’ of her pop teenage culture”.)

The film works hard to build such bridges between its first 60 and its last 30 minutes, but the massive gear-change is not entirely well judged, interrelated or achieved.

It's impossible, however, to overpraise Dern’s performance. Perfectly cast, she’s the absolute epitome of vacillation between child, adolescent and woman, all evident in the one body, and revealed by diverse manifestations of expression and impression. Everything in her career from Blue Velvet (1986) to Rambling Rose (1991) and way beyond is already sketched out, in a virtual array of layers and possibilities. You just have to watch the petting-in-a-car scene where Connie’s both turned on and apprehensive, fleeing once she declares: “I’m not used to feeling this excited”.

Now, I ask you: is this a character you want to see reduced to the innocent-victim narrative-fate options of ‘a rape or a drive in the country’?

Chopra had the good sense to leave that whole dice-game of speculation open, but she ends the long seduction-duel between Arnold and Connie with an incredible ‘gone in the splice’ moment: as Connie counters his call of “My sweet, blue-eyed girl” with “What if my eyes were brown?”, she swiftly exits the frame. And the scene ends right there, on that tiny but surprising abyss.

© Adrian Martin 7 August 2023