MOVIE REVIEWS
After the breezy successes of Grease and The Blue Lagoon, director Randal Kleiser made what can only be described as one of the greatest guilty-pleasure movies of all time. Summer Lovers is a bubble-brained movie if ever there was one, involving a love triangle between characters who have all the depth of a Calvin Klein commercial; but you don't care because the movie's so irresistibly alluring.
Daryl Hannah and Peter Gallagher play a young couple vacationing in Greece when they meet one of the island locals, a gorgeous paleontologist (French actress Valérie Quennessen) who quickly proves that when it comes to love on a Greek island, three is better than two. This innocent flirtation endures a bit of ego-bruising animosity, but suspicion eventually subsides and blossoms into a sensuously delightful ménage à trois, accompanied by a soundtrack full of early-'80s pop by Chicago, Elton John, Blondie, the Pointer Sisters, and others.
In addition to suggesting an interesting use of candle wax during foreplay and treating viewers to the vision of Ms. Quennessen cavorting topless whenever the impulse strikes her (and it strikes her frequently), Summer Lovers is like a time capsule from the earliest years of MTV. It's mindless entertainment, but on vacations like this, who wants to be an intellectual?
- JEFF SHANNON
RANDAL KLEISER'S ''Summer Lovers,'' which opens today at Loews State and other theaters, is, among other things, one of the best arguments against tourism ever committed to the screen. It takes place on the Greek island of Santorini, and as the film begins, hundreds of tanned, well-heeled young visitors descend on the place. Shoving aside peasants and donkeys, they rent most of the island's cottages, take countless snapshots and bop to the disco music they so dearly love. You couldn't run a windmill with the collective brainpower of everyone involved.
''Oh, wow!'' says Cathy (Daryl Hannah) as she gets off the plane. ''All right!'' exclaims Michael (Peter Gallagher), her boyfriend. ''I can't tell you how much this place turns me on,'' Michael says later, and he is not just talking about the sunset. The island, which by now looks like an ant colony, is loaded with great-looking swingers who sunbathe in the nude. When he and Cathy first visit the beach, Michael brings his binoculars. Supposedly eyeing the nearby rock formations, Michael declares, ''I think I'll go exploring.''
Now, Michael and Cathy have not been getting along too well - we know that from the copies of ''Imaginative Sex'' and ''Nice Girls Do'' that Cathy keeps by the bedside. So it is not altogether surprising that Michael begins stalking Lina (Valerie Quennessen), a cute Frenchwoman well versed in the things Cathy has been reading up on. After eyeing Lina for a couple of days, Michael strikes up a conversation with her on a bus and follows her to the beach. She is being quite haughty and indifferent, even when - voila! - she matterof-factly removes all her clothing. Michael looks a little flustered by this. You cannot exactly blame him.
But it isn't long before Michael has gotten over his shyness and won Lina over by dropping pebbles all over her. This is the start of an excessively beautiful friendship. When the not-sufficientlycarefree Cathy finds out what Michael has been up to, she makes some trouble. ''You stink, you know that?'' Cathy shouts. ''Yeah, I know that,'' Michael replies. Mr. Kleiser's screenplay is tongue-tied, but it is no worse than his slow, dopey, thoroughly disingenuous direction.
Mr. Kleiser, it should be remembered, is the man behind ''The Blue Lagoon,'' a film that presented the spectacle of two gorgeous, barely dressed young innocents to an audience of ticket-buying teen-agers. How better to improve on this, Mr. Kleiser appears to have asked himself, than to provide three such characters, change the island and cut back even further on the clothing allowance? That is what he has done in ''Summer Lovers,'' and that is all he has done. The characters are so idiotically wholesome that their menage a trois is never convincing, and their travails seem laughably unimportant.
Michael's big complaint, for instance, after both Cathy and Lina have apparently bedded down with him but not with each other - this is a movie that is exploitative enough to contain lots of nudity, but hypocritical enough to keep the sex off-camera -is that the women are not doing the housework. ''I can't live like this!'' he cries, staring angrily at a pile of laundry. Boo-hoo.
It does not appear likely that teen-age audiences will find crowded, disco-ridden Santorini (with some additional footage on Mykonos, Crete and Delos) as glamorous as the tropical paradise of Mr. Kleiser's last film, or that they will be as interested in softcore hokum when it is minus Brooke Shields. Mr. Gallagher has eyebrows rather like Miss Shields's, but the resemblance ends there, and the rest of him is disturbingly doltish. Miss Hannah, who cut a striking figure as the acrobatic, punk-looking android in ''Blade Runner,'' does a complete turnaround here; as the straight-arrow, surfer-girl Cathy, she could not be more bland. Miss Quennessen, looking pert and clever, is a lot more intriguing than her co-stars, but the script does not show her off to any advantage. When Cathy comes to visit and remarks, ''You have a lot of books on archeology,'' poor Lina must snap back, ''I'm an archaelogist.'' It is never explained why, even though absolutely everybody in the movie is on the prowl, the very pretty Lina can have a see-through wardrobe, an anything-goes attitude, a nice villa all her own - and nobody but Cathy or Michael to talk to.
Three's Company.
- JANET MASLIN (Published: August 20, 1982)
Improbably bland sweethearts Michael and Cathy (Gallagher, Hannah) rent a holiday villa on a Greek island teeming with wanton youths sporting colourful nylon rucksacks and all-over tans. The couple's fragile happiness is shattered when Michael has an affair with another woman (Quennessen), then restored when she moves into their villa and bed.
For us to believe in these liberated living arrangements, Kleiser brings the women into unusually sharp relief (for this type of film), knocking Michael from the film's and ménage's centre. However, by so revealing the two women, Kleiser makes us wonder why they would turn to the resoundingly dull Michael for anything.
But the film plays safe, presumably a concession (like the pounding disco soundtrack) to the conservative taste of the American public, which was polled throughout the making of the film. But all this cannot entirely remove the piquant sensuality that will titillate more subtle palates.
- F.D.
"Summer Lovers" is a beach party movie for the 1980s. It begins with the genre's basic ingredients: sun, sand, surf, bikinis and a nearby disco. But we no longer live in quite such an innocent world as the one inhabited by the beach party gang, so in addition to the sun, sand, etc., this movie also contains graduate students, Greek wine, ennui, troubled relationships, problems with self-image, visits to an archeological dig and the current war-cry of love affairs, "Trust me."
Basically, though, what we're talking about here is sun sand, surf and bikinis. The movie takes place on a Greek island, circa right now. A young American couple has come spend the summer. They've been living together for about five years and have a good relationship based on mutual understanding and intellectual respect and other concepts that would come as news to Frankie and Annette.
Anyway, they rent a beautiful snow-white villa up on a hill overlooking the sparkling waters and terraced village. Things go well for a while; she works on her art studies, he scoots around the island on his motorcycle, and then, one day, everything changes when he notices the deep, dark eyes of a young French woman regarding him with tantalizing frankness.
What develops next will not come as news to devoted readers of the movie's ads. The summer grows hot and slow and boring, and the couple begin to get on each other's nerves, and the guy happens to run into the French woman, who is an archeologist, and they find themselves powerfully attracted to each other physically and spend the night together, and the next day he gets tears and accusations from his American girlfriend and there goes their "open relationship," failing its first acid test.
But then the young American woman boldly goes to visit the French woman. They sort of like one another. They become friends. Now it's the guy's turn to be threatened. But gradually, through lots of bonfires and dinners and visits to archeological digs, a sort of menage a trois develops. I say menage a trois cautiously, since this one doesn't fit the textbook definition: Both of the women become the man's lovers, but they do not have a relationship with one another. There are a few things that the beach party genre is not yet quite ready for.
All of this is sort of fun, in a silly way. A lot of the credit for that has to go to the three actors, who are attractive and engaging enough to sell this very slight material through the warmth of their own personalities. The American students are played by Peter Gallagher, looking curly-headed and Greek-American, and Daryl Hannah, blond and with a lovely smile. The French women is Valerie Quennessen, dark-haired and a little offbeat, as all archeologists are, of course.
The movie's a little confusing, though, perhaps because the director, Randal Kleiser, could never quite make up his mind about his story. Kleiser is best-known for "Grease" and for the Brooke Shields deserted island romance, "The Blue Lagoon."
This time, he seems to be going for something more than soft porn in the lagoon. He wants to tell us something about these characters. He wants (gasp!) to have insights about them. But only up to a point.
His problem, then, is that his insights keep interrupting the sex, and the sex keeps undermining the insights. The result is a movie that doesn't really work as semi-erotic romance, and never quite gets itself together as a character study. It's as if Frankie and Annette were in therapy.
- ROGER EBERT (August 4, 1982)
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