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Wednesday, March 3, 1999
JOHN ALLEMANG
Love shouldn't be serious, should it?
That's the musical question posed throughout the six linked love stories that comprise Foolish Heart,Ken Finkleman's latest attempt to fill the small screen with big ideas. It starts tonight at 9 p.m. on CBC.
But the carefree, romantic sentiments crooned so beguilingly by chanteuse Patricia O'Callaghan don't begin to express love's range in this stimulating and maddening short series. A lawyer discovers her Zen Buddhist husband has struck up an affair with an architect who's working on their house. An immigrant dishwasher gives her all for a son gone wrong, and is rejected by the boyfriend who once soothed her sufferings. A compassionate judge loses his ability to feel real passion, but rediscovers it in the arms of a simple dishwasher even as his cold wife is giving herself to a French waiter who quotes Milan Kundera.
And because a Finkleman project would be nothing without appearances by the auteur himself, the overriding love story is the messy affair between a married director (played by Finkleman) and a married writer (a very persuasive Sarah Strange). This relationship, in the deliberately confusing Finkleman fashion, is mirrored by a more surreal, screwball-comedy kind of liaison between an all-knowing director, also played by Finkleman, and a high-society writer, also played by Strange.
"Love can be a saviour," one of the characters says at the beginning of Foolish Heart,"and it can be a monster." With lilting love songs on the soundtrack to thaw cold reason, the sudden infatuations and impulsive affairs look at first like salvation. Marriage is a moralizing construct built for practical use -- deny your fits of passion, though, and you deny your life.
But salvation all too often turns out be an escapist illusion, just a moment of gratification masking itself as something timeless and romantic. And when the passion offered by Finkleman's scheming seducers wears away ("I'm having an affair . . ." one such character tells his wife matter-of-factly. "I think it won't last too long") the monster rears its head. At the end of tonight's episode, for example, the cuckolded wife solves her betrayal with a shotgun (a standard item in the cupboards of Toronto's downtown intellectuals, apparently).
And in the third episode, when Tony Nardi's introspective judge thinks he has found real happiness in the arms of Arsinée Khanjian's wonderfully life-affirming Armenian dishwasher ("I never thought that love could be separate from the intellect"), a stern off-screen voice immediately deflates him. "She has a mind, but you've objectified her, intellectually defined her as passion, intuition, the heart."
Such high-minded commentary has come to typify Finkleman's work, and while it's so frequent as to no longer be jarring, it gets in the way of his art. In a compressed 30-minute drama, it must seem a great luxury to have characters who can stop and explain everything that's going on just like a wise narrator in an old-fashioned Russian novel. But within the fictional (or semi-autobiographical) Toronto world that Finkleman's labouring so mightily to create, all this pat artificiality comes across as smug and even arrogant.
For the first three episodes of Foolish Heart,Finkleman does his best to resist these creative intrusions, letting his characters play out their lives by themselves. Yes, there is the annoying framework of a film within a film that serves to tell you Finkleman is trying to do something more important than mere mass-market TV entertainment. But tonight, and for the next two weeks, it's mainly storytelling, and when the French waiter isn't holding forth on the modernist impulse, we see the desperate professionals with their accomplished children and their dutiful nannies trying to recover the spark of life.
These stories are imperfect, as you would expect when so much creative ambition has to be fitted into the half-hour frame. Logic suffers (why does the treasured son get shot at the end of next week's episode?) and characters' motivations are left hanging. Though love shouldn't be serious, you still want to know what makes a person suddenly ruin his or her life. It's not enough to know that he's a Blake scholar or she's a mousy writer who foolishly believes you can keep love's monsters at bay. Nardi's judge is so interesting precisely because he feels conflict and tries to express it, finding his only listener in a woman who can't understand him. It is a neat paradox, but such depth of character is all too rare.
By the fourth episode, Finkleman is back to his old tricks: While the layers of complexity increase as his personas cavort with their various women, the simple stories of love suddenly turn into a New York Review of Books treatise. Finkleman's character Peter has announced his affair to his wife. He goes to work on his films about love, and then the wife (Jennifer Wigmore) phones in her analysis of his actions while contemplating the result of a car wreck as if she were in a 1960s French art-film.
"I have a story for you," she begins in a controlled monotone. "A man who has everything but wants his youth falls in love with a woman who is the younger version of his wife. He believes that through her eyes he will be the younger version of himself. He understands this as a fantasy, but chooses to believe he can live in this fantasy. This decision allows him to become infantile, egocentric and impulsive. He loses empathy and foresight. His wife is driving her car and thinking about him. . . ."
That is Foolish Heart at its worst, where Finkleman strives to remind us that he is a born-again intellectual working in an anti-intellectual medium. He can lift references from the usual artistic icons but he can't bring himself to reinvent them.
But where the egocentricity subsides and he takes himself out of camera range (does anyone really care about his relationship with newspaper critics?) Foolish Heart actually has a heart. TV shouldn't be serious, should it?