One from the Heart (1981)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

One from the Heart (1981) – F. F. Coppola

I’ve finally gotten around to watching this famous flop (the 2003 re-release, I think) by Francis Ford Coppola – the follow-up to Apocalypse Now, retreating to the newly purchased Zoetrope Studios to do everything off-location (as it were).  So, he built Las Vegas’s famous Strip, neon and all, from scratch, and set out to use all of the latest technological cinematic methods (including the first use of “video assist”, something that my long-lost friend Tim O’Toole used to commandeer back in Minnesota) to create this highly stylised colourful musical.  Tom Waits wrote all of the songs on the soundtrack, which accent or comment upon the action, assisted by Crystal Gayle – but this is definitely the bluesy ‘70s Waits rather than the weirder more experimental persona he later adopted (think Foreign Affairs more than Swordfishtrombones).  Did I say “highly stylised”? The film’s plot, which finds Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest as a couple breaking up on their fifth anniversary, is just a schematic framework on which to hang the set-pieces, art design, and music. I didn’t mind this, occasionally thinking of (the much better) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964, where the dialogue is entirely sung, unlike here).  That was probably Coppola’s aim, to recreate the lavish musicals of the past, but it’s hard to get emotionally involved here.  Although Garr and Forrest give it their best shot, they never seen made for each other or even interested in each other (instead, as others have noted, they might be better partnered with Raul Julia and Natassja Kinski, with whom they have one-night flings). Ultimately, it’s a bit of a mess but every other scene seems to contain eye-popping technical wizardry, clearly expensive enough to have bankrupted Coppola. Still worth a look.