Maria's Lovers

The first American feature film by the noted Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky is a postwar drama about how ideals collide with reality. John Savage (The Deer Hunter, Hair, Inside Moves) plays Ivan, a WWII veteran who returns to the Yugoslavian immigrant community of his Pennsylvania hometown after spending most of the war in a Japanese POW camp. He moves back in with his father (Robert Mitchum) and rekindles his relationship with his childhood sweetheart Maria (Nastassja Kinski), whose image as the ideal woman kept him going during his years being tortured in the camp. Kinski's Maria indeed seems like the ideal woman; she is beautiful and warm, and she wants to be with him despite her involvement with another soldier (Vincent Spano). When Ivan and Maria marry, their wedded bliss turns sour as Ivan is unable to perform sexually with the woman he's fixated upon for so long, now that he has her.

It's amazing that any American movie studio would give this former Soviet filmmaker financing to tell a story about an impotent, cuckolded American veteran who can't get it up for Nastassja Kinski—complete with a shot of Kinski getting dressed in the bathroom while Savage rocks forlornly on a little kid’s tricycle that's inexplicably in their home! But this is a Golan and Globus production made during the era when their tax-shelter exploitation factory Cannon films attempted arthouse fare like John Cassavetes' Love Streams and Menahem Golan's own Over the Brooklyn Bridge. I'm sure the lure of this title and the notion of Kinski in multiple sex scenes appealed to the two producers as well. But Maria's Lovers is decidedly not a work of exploration cinema; it's an honest attempt at exploring the still little-understood issue of PTSD.

The movie looks incredible, with cinematography by Juan Ruiz Anchía (The Stone Boy, At Close Range, House of Games) that makes the Pennsylvania town look incredibly lush and idealistic. The cast is impressive: Keith Carradine plays a guitar-playing lothario drifter who tries to sweep Maria off her feet, Anita Morris plays the sexy neighbor lady whom Ivan is able to have bed since he doesn't love her, and late in the picture, we meet Bud Cort, Karen Young, Tracy Nelson, and John Goodman (fun to see Goodman in another of the small 1984 roles that put him on the map along with Crackers, C.H.U.D., and Revenge of the Nerds).

Unfortunately, none of these actors, even the leads, play characters who develop into much of anything. People just kind of come and go in this movie, as if serving a function in the story rather than establishing a foothold in the main character's life. That may be part of the point in that this is a movie about a damaged individual who wartime experiences have left him unable to fully connect with others. But, if that's the case, the movie doesn't spend enough time with Ivan and plays out more like an ensemble film. If Maria herself had been the main character, the film might have been able to explore its themes better since we are always on the outside looking in. As it is, the various transitions in the narrative seem to come out of left field, especially the conclusion, which feels like something tacked on after poor test screenings (though I doubt that was the case). Maria's Lovers has the feel of a two-hour movie adapted from a lengthy novel, though it is an original screenplay by Konchalovsky, Marjorie David, New York author Paul Zindel, and French screenwriter Gérard Brach (Repulsion, Tess, Quest for Fire, Jean de Florette).