Director: Barbet Schroeder
Had I seen this before: No
I came into this film knowing two things about it: someone steals a haircut and someone else gets a high heel to the face. And I have to say, all the connecting tissue was pretty much exactly what I, a connoisseur of the Golden Era of Lifetime movies, was expecting it to be. My teen years were made-for-TV-movie central. I was well aware of The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. I watched Mother, May I Sleep with Danger on its first run. There was a (horrible, not that murder isn't generally horrible, but truly so sad and pointless) murder at my high school and they made a TV movie of it so quickly that they couldn't air it in our local market because they hadn't had the trial yet so we had to watch it on a VHS tape that someone's dad recorded while on a business trip out of town. (I realize that sounds ghoulish now but we were teenagers and it was easier then to hold both "I am upset by what happened to my classmate" and "Hey look that's the fast-food chicken place I drive by all the time" in my head at once.) And as a person who quit drinking many years ago I have a long-running fear that someone will knock me unconscious and inject vodka into my bloodstream as part of an effort to frame me for some horrible thing because that once happened to a lady in a TV-movie, the name of which is forever lost to time.
So those are my bona fides and trust me when I say: this is a TV-movie with a real-movie cast. You got your big-city early-90s woman and her disappointing boyfriend. You got your sexual harasser client threatening her fledgling career. You got your non-threatening gay friend upstairs whose only personality is "helpful" (played by Frank from Succession!). You got your Chekov's conveniently-placed screwdriver. You got your cute puppy that you have to spend the whole movie worrying about due to stressful music cues. (Well....not the whole movie.) You got your villain sitting in a dark room saying "Where the hell have you been" before dramatically switching on a lamp. You got your shoebox full of extremely easy-to-piece-together dark secrets from the past.
The star of this movie, to me, is the extremely distinctive bright red bowl cut sported by Bridget Fonda and then eventually by Jennifer Jason Leigh as well. The film probably doesn't work if Fonda's character has hair that is even remotely common, because JJL's decision to precisely mimic it cannot be interpreted as a reasonable style choice--it has to immediately register as the result of obvious psychopathy. "I would like to be a redhead, but also a mushroom," it says. Additionally, the combination of artificially bright hair and brown lipstick reminded me that I was safely ensconced in the warm bosom of the early to mid 1990s, where I belong.
It's good that our main character (the hair) is so iconic because the other characters are a little hard to get behind. I do think Bridget Fonda and Steven Webber (the eventual recipient of the impaling-high-heel) probably belonged together just based on the weakness of their excuses when they're up to no good. (Bridget Fonda gets caught rifling through JJL's things: "I didn't know you were home." Steven Webber gets caught sleeping with his ex: "She's very depressed.") JJL does have some good creepy villainous scenes but her weird childhood hangup doesn't really track. ("Identical twins are never really identical," sure, okay, I'm with you, "there's always one that's prettier" uhhhhh I could not tell most twins apart if my life depended on it.) Stephen Tobolowsky is effective as a dude who you immediately know is going to be a problem, but the movie did make me worry that the ending was going to be a Jurassic Park situation where the attempted rapist (T-rex) comes in to take out the psycho stalker (raptors) and save the day. Fortunately that wasn't how it played out, but the almost-hero moment he gets is still tough. The other residents in this beautiful classy apartment building are also amusingly awful, just based on the fact that slightly loud rock music causes everyone in the building, including security, to spring into action within minutes, but a screaming fight to the death including slamming elevators doors and gunshots doesn't draw any response at all. Those are bad neighbors! I think the neighbors might be the real bad guys here!
Line I repeated quietly to myself: None, because the dialogue in this is just...perfunctory. It's not great and it's not really bad enough to be fun. You would think there would be more campiness, based on the lunacy of the movie as a whole, but I guess the hair is really sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But I did chuckle when one of the prospective roommates gasped in dismay at the presence of a kitchen: "Oh, God, a kitchen." Godspeed rejected roommate, I hope you found that kitchen-free apartment you were looking for. I have been led to believe that in New York, anything is possible!
Is it under two hours: Yes
In conclusion: I basically used this film as an almost two-hour meditation on gratitude surrounding the fact that I am not currently in a position in my life to be seeking an adult stranger as a roommate. Very positive experience. Feeling grounded and calm.
Perfect Scrambled Eggs from The Food Network
Heddy is a very bad roommate in many crucial ways, but she does make a nice-looking breakfast spread. I made a slightly less nice-looking breakfast spread because for some reason Alton Brown wanted me to melt the butter on high heat and it got all burnt and gross and my eggs were gray. What the hell, man? Low heat for eggs! Low heat. I'm pretty sure Alton would also be a very annoying roommate.
Up next: A summer hiatus while my family and I go look at a large hole