A Safe Place

source: A Safe Place

Trailer—A Safe Place

A Safe Place

A great disappointment to see movie stars that I love, lend themselves to this realization that is not a film but a junkie delirium under acid. Orson Welles has never been so ridiculous and he would have been better off abstaining. As for Tuesday Weld, always as beautiful and Jack Nicholson always as talented and casual, they are the only attractions of this pitiful company. Obviously, the director did not write any scripts or dialogues and he merely filmed his actors by letting them manage to improvise recklessly something not too pitiful. The result is a sickening fiasco

This Henry Jaglom film serves absolutely no purpose other than for Orson Welles to do some phony magic tricks with the help of the movie camera and play good witch to Tuesday Weld who lives in a weird fantasy world. The soundtrack interrupts the minimal dialog with a bunch of old songs throughout (a few repeated several times), and then Jack Nicholson pops up here and there as one of the men whom Weld is dating while having weird little girl fantasies. Nothing about this makes any sense, but there's some enjoyable Central Park locations that shows the cuddly Welles with Weld leaning on his shoulder. Welles has a weird cartoonish accent, Nicholson is completely wasted, and leading lady Weld seems to be playing a role with absolutely no depth. Gwen Welles (no relationship to Orson) gets special billing for no purpose. Only recommended for Jaglom fans, and many of them will most likely be perplexed by this odd experiment.

---and this brilliant little gem is proof thereof. Drawing almost equally from the French New Wave as he did Ambrose Bierce's AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE, Jaglom's "safe place" for Tuesday Weld's character is her own imagination, where her eccentricities can bloom in complete innocence without being impinged upon by the "real world." A gorgeous salad of fragments that collect themselves into a unit of an ethereal base, A SAFE PLACE is the kind of film you would imagine the artists whose drawings graced the pages of the "underground press" art papers (the San Francisco Oracle, for example) would try to make out of their visions. There are also nice parts for the actors Welles -- Orson, happy to perform as a magician in an all-too-rare chance, and Gwen, who is touching and magnetic in her first film role. Both Welleses left us before their time, and A SAFE PLACE provides a beautiful and unique glimpse of each.

Wonderfully bizarre and experimental piece of work for which Jaglom should be very proud. Welles and Nicholson are great in this head game. Let yourself go when you watch this--experience it--this is not a "movie"--this is a trip!! You will get as much out of this as you allow yourself to take.

I don't know why I hadn't seen this movie before. I find the script an almost perfect one, closer to poetry than to the novel and a cinema language that owes a lot to Jean Luc Godard but nevertheless contributes to a post-modern comprehension of cinema as an art form in constant evolution. A 'must see' for any serious student of the evolution of cinema. The film's cinematography, with a clear cut preference for close ups, is a contribution to the general epos of the story. A real masterpiece, which I am sure will gain in public aclaim as time passes. A 10 by any standard. Pedro Saad

The title of my review is no exaggeration. The only saving grace to watching this movie is that it's only about an hour and a half in length, even though it seems at least twice that long to view. The screenplay (assuming there really was a screenplay to begin with, because the dialogue feels totally improvised...not because it sounds "real", but because it's strained and ludicrous) is annoying to the nth degree, unless you like hearing profound voice-over comments such as "I love you from New York to Rome..from Rome to Madrid, etc. etc. etc. over and over and over again. If I was on a deserted island with a DVD player and this was the only DVD I had with me, I'd break it in a hundred pieces with a coconut because, otherwise, I'd end up searching for a shark to eat me as soon as possible. If I had a choice between being water-boarded and being forced to watch this movie repeatedly, I'd have a VERY tough decision to make. But, other than that, the movie was great.

A strange young woman (Tuesday Weld) lives in a fantasy world where she can never grow up. Henry Jaglom's directorial debut was a "critical and box-office disaster". Time magazine called the film "pretentious and confusing", a film that "suggests that the rumors of his expertise were greatly exaggerated, or at least that it does not extend to directing." Apparently, for the critics, not even the presence of the incredible Orson Welles or Jack Nicholson could save this one. Author Anais Nin was perhaps the most kind. She called the film "an impressionistic film, an X ray of our psychic life, which gives an insight instantly into the secret self." She called it a "masterpiece", and praised it for its dreamlike quality that could only be captured on film.