Product: That Cold Day in the Park
Rating: 5.0
Robert Altman's off-beat, forgotten masterpiece of loneliness and sexual obsession.
Academy-Award winning actress Sandy Dennis, on the downside of an unsustainable fire-hot popularity that began with 1966's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," stars as Frances Austen, a wealthy, 32-year-old woman living alone in a spacious apartment in Vancouver, Canada. Prim and cripplingly repressed, Frances lives a life of formal ritual, surrounded by friends who are at least 20 years her senior (they, like her staid apartment, appear to have been inherited from her dead mother). One rainy afternoon she spies a young man sitting alone on a park bench and invites him in to get dry. The blankly cherubic 19 year-old (Michael Burns) speaks not a word, but allows the solicitous woman to bathe, feed, and eventually house him. The boy's silent passivity (he's never named) and apparent lack of friends or family enables Frances to project a great deal of her own loneliness onto his situation, awakening in her an acute awareness of long-repressed desires. Before long, Frances' initial maternal concern gives way to darker obsessions as the boy comes to symbolize a last-chance grasp at life.Read full review:[...]