Blame It on Rio

One of the most infamous movies of the year 1984 is this beyond-sleazy sex farse about a middle-aged guy who has an affair with his best friend's seventeen-year-old daughter while both buddies are vacationing in Rio with their teenage girls. That the film resulted from the combination of such pedigreed talent as director Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain, On the Town, Charade), screenwriter Larry Gelbart (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Tootsie, and the iconic TV shows Caesar's Hour and MASH), and the charming, prolific, talented actor Michael Caine (Zulu, Alfie, Sleuth, The Man Who Would Be King, Dressed to Kill, Educating Rita) makes it somehow worse. These guys teamed up with cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos (9 to 5, Personal Best, Risky Business, Mike's Murder) for an American remake of the Claude Berri comedy Un moment d'égarement. I've never seen the original film, but I can only imagine material like this played better in France, where the age of consent is lower and where sexual attitudes are 180 degrees from where they are (or were) in America in 1984.

Caine plays Matthew Hollis, who is married to Valerie Harper's Karen, with whom he has a teenage daughter, Nikki (Demi Moore, in her second movie—she dropped out of playing Lucy Lane in Supergirl in favor of this "prestige" picture). Matthew and Karen are close with Matthew's colleague and best friend, Victor Lyons (Joseph Bologna). Victor's daughter Jennifer (Michelle Johnson in her debut feature) grew up with Nikki since their parents have been very close since they were born. The fact that Matthew has known Jennifer since she was a baby makes the fact that he has sex with her and starts a clandestine relationship with her during this vacation all the more upsetting, to say nothing of how much of a serious betrayal of friendship he embarks on with his best bud. Gelbart tries to get around this by making Victor a pretty awful guy as well, but the old "everyone is terrible" defense never works and really doesn't work in this movie, especially since Jennifer is not at all a bad person. Sure, she seduces her father's best friend, but it's pretty difficult to put the onus on her.

The other technique Donen and Gelbart apply is having the film told to us by the characters via frequently cutting to them directly addressing the camera from some future time explaining how everything went down. These confessionals are shot almost exactly like the bookends of Alvy Singer speaking to the audience in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Forty years later, evoking the Woodman in a movie with this subject matter does it no favors. Now, I'm not someone who would reject this premise on principle regardless of how it was executed. Blame it on Rio is a bad film because of how labored the comedy is and how lazy the writing is. I've never seen Caine give a bad performance, and Lord knows he had a lot of opportunities in the 1980s when he seemed to say yes to everything that was offered him, but his genial, put-upon effect wears thin quickly. Bologna, whose blow-hard bluster was put to such excellent effect in his prior picture, My Favorite Year, is such a loud one-note here that we dread any time he enters a scene. Michelle Johnson should be commended for giving her all in her first movie. Her commitment to the character and apparent comfort with the amount of nudity required make her an intriguing screen presence. If only her role was as developed as she is. (That's a cheap joke, but that's the kind of movie this is). The twinkly title song that gets played incessantly pretty much sums up this movie's tedious, cutesy adolescent aesthetic.