`A Walk in the Clouds,” a romance set in 1945 in northern California’s Napa Valley, looks and sounds like a dream of postwar storybook bliss. Visually, this film–in which Keanu Reeves plays a returning World War II vet, masquerading as the husband of an unwed mother from a Mexican-American wine-growing family–is intoxicating. It’s a big, lushly colored, wish-fulfillment fantasy, with lovers dancing like angels, and the cameras dancing behind and around them.
But that intense lyricism has a bad side. The dream almost never convincingly touches earth. It’s as if the moviemakers took the loonier cliches and conventions of a ’40s Fox Technicolor musical–some frothy Betty Grable-Don Ameche-Carmen Miranda confection, full of rumbas, mistaken identities and exotic Latin locales–and then tried to play them straight, as a serious art film.
Yet, silly as it is–and there are moments when “Walk in the Clouds” seems to exist to provide Mad magazine with one of its funnier movie parodies–there’s a voluptuous shine and sensuousness to the images that keep you watching, hoping.
The director, Alfonso Arau, and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, made the scrumptious 1992 Mexican movie “Like Water for Chocolate.” (Lubezki also shot the shimmering “A Little Princess” for another Mexican director, Alfonso Cuaron.) Together, these two make the landscapes gleam, the vineyards glow. Their lusciously filtered lights and elaborate crane and tracking shots catch your imagination in a way the characters can’t.
The movie–co-written by Robert Mark Kamen, based on a 1942 Italian romance called “Quattro Passi fra le Nuvole” (“Four Steps in the Clouds”)–tries for an American equivalent of the Latin American literary genre “magic realism.” But there’s hardly any realism here. And, in the end, not much magic. (Except for the images.)
The look of “Clouds” is lyrical, but the ideas behind it are often recycled movie hash. Reeves’ Paul Sutton is a soldier returning to a mercenary tramp of a wife (Debra Messing) and working as a traveling chocolate salesman. Idealistic, unappreciated Paul is riding a train when he bumps–literally–into a beautiful but troubled Mexican girl, Victoria Aragon (played by Spanish actress Aitana Sanchez-Gijon).
Fate and Hollywood romantic-comedy conventions throw these two together. They fall over each other, accidentally get their tickets mixed, then meet again on a bus, where Paul is ejected for defending Victoria from two mashers. Soon, on the sun-dappled woodsy roadside, he learns of her problem. Pregnant by her cad of a college professor, she’s afraid to face her family, especially her ill-tempered father, Alberto (Giancarlo Giannini). Gallantly, Paul leaps into the breach, offering to pose for a day as her husband, then discreetly vanish.
It’s a truly dopey scheme. And, once it’s set in motion, absurdities pile up thick as overripe grapes on the vine. Paul and Victoria decide to con her parents by slipping onto their fingers fake gold bands from the chocolate boxes. (Doesn’t Paul already have a wedding ring?) Meeting the Aragons, Paul unintentionally antagonizes Alberto–though he seems able to immediately charm Grandpa Don Pedro (Anthony Quinn), Mama Marie-Jose (Angelica Aragon) and Grandma Guadelupe (Evangelina Elizondo).)
As the now-enamored-but-discreet couple sexlessly share their wedding bed, suspicious Papa Alberto spies on them. And every time Paul tries to leave the vineyard, Don Pedro pops up to intercept him, regaling him with Aragon lore. There are erotic dances in grape tubs and desperate battles against the frost. Finally, toward the end, we’re asked to believe that Alberto, drunk and angry, would fight Paul by heaving a flaming lantern at him, right in the middle of his vineyard.
Is this the right material for magic realism? Or a screwball sex comedy? I’d say the latter. And, in fact, the original “Four Steps in the Clouds” was a comedy, though with an important difference. Directed by Allesandro Blasetti and co-written by Cesare Zavattini (who, several years later, shook up the international film world with his great scripts for Vittoria De Sica’s “Shoeshine” and “The Bicycle Thief”), “Four Steps” was set in its own time, the thick of World War II. And its heroine wasn’t the daughter of a wealthy vintner family, but a peasant girl.
Arau and Kamen, by changing the social setting, turn the harder-edged original into a mindlessly good-hearted fairy tale, with Reeves as a kind of Cinderfella and Sanchez-Gijon as an addled Princess Charming. The middle-class chocolate salesman of Blasetti’s film risked little by helping out a poor peasant girl in trouble. But Paul–who, amazingly, gives the Aragons his real name–risks harassment, private detectives, a lawsuit and, if he’s unlucky, a vendetta right out of Sam Peckinpah’s “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.”
Reeves has taken hits from some critics for his part here, but his performance actually fits right into the aestheticized, swoony mood. (He and Quinn give two of the better performances.) But if you wanted to bring magic realism to American movies, why hire as your scenarist Robert Mark Kamen, the writer of “The Karate Kid” and “Lethal Weapon 3?”
Arau is primarily known in the U.S. for “Like Water”–and also possibly for his work as an actor, especially his great role in Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.” And he’s so commercially canny–his 1980 comedy “Wetback Power” is one of the all-time Mexican box-office hits–that you can’t be sure he hasn’t planned everything cleverly, right down to Kamen’s preposterous script.
In reshaping this schmaltzy story into a celebration of photogenic young love and the Mexican vineyard aristocracy, Arau may have figured out exactly what his public–and Keanu Reeves’ fans–want. Moviegoers, who love dreams, sometimes aren’t fussy about dream-logic. Everything in the story makes so little sense, and it’s done on such a grand and crazy scale, that it wouldn’t have surprised me if “A Walk in the Clouds” had ended with Paul Sutton flailing up out of a nightmare brought on by too much vino.
This is a movie where you can get drunk on the imagery, sloshed on the scenery. But perhaps not quite drunk enough.
”A WALK IN THE CLOUDS”
(star) (star) 1/2
Directed by Alfonso Arau; written by Robert Mark Kamen, Mark Miller, Harvey Weitzman; photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki; edited by Don Zimmerman; production designed by David Gropman; music by Maurice Jarre; produced by Gil Netter, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker. A 20th Century Fox release; opens Friday at Broadway Cinema, Esquire, Lincoln Village and outlying theaters. Running time: 1:43. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Paul Sutton………………………….Keanu Reeves
Victoria Aragon……………….Aitana Sanchez-Gijon
Alberto Aragon………………….Giancarlo Giannini
Don Pedro Aragon…………………….Anthony Quinn
Marie Jose Aragon………………….Angelica Aragon
Guadelupe Aragon……………….Evangelina Elizondo
