The Woman in Red

Gene Wilder's remake of Yves Robert's comedy Pardon Mon Affaire is one of 1984's low points. It's almost a scene-for-scene remake of the French film that starred Jean Rochefort but with a tedious, repressed American sensibility. Wilder plays Teddy Pierce, a dreary, unattractive guy suffering a midlife crisis. He's got a good life with a nice wife, pleasant kids, and a job in that oh-so-'80s career of advertising. As in the French film, he's part of a quartet of male buddies who each have different views on monogamy, with Teddy the most faithful and traditional. That is until he starts to become obsessed with a woman he sees at the beginning of the movie. The titular woman in red is a fashion model played by fashion model Kelly LeBrock, making her film debut. While sitting in his car one day, Teddy sees the lovely Charlotte, dressed in red, walk over a ventilation grate in the parking garage with the updraft of air exposing her red satin panties. Just like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, she seems to enjoy the blast of air that sends her dress flying up over her head, and she stops to dance around in the breeze for a few moments. This action seems to trigger something in Teddy's middle-aged brain that unleashes a tedious comedy of errors.

Teddy spends the rest of the movie trying to bed Charlotte, who finds him far more amusing than I do watching this movie. The Woman in Red plays a little as if Blake Edwards' 10 wasn't committed enough to go full farse or self-aware enough to explore the insecurities of its protagonist with any depth. Most romantic comedies are based around some form of deceit. The trick to creating a good rom-com is to make the inciting deception credible and interesting, then continuously build upon that chicanery, heightening the level of tension and humor without rupturing the audience's suspension of disbelief that the ill-advised courses of action the characters take make sense in the moment. The deception that The Woman in Red is built around simply involves a guy lying to his wife. The ways the humor gets elevated mostly have to do with contrived mistaken identity gags that only relate somewhat to the main story. We're meant to find Wilder's exaggerated lying hilarious, and the more he doubles down, the more we're supposed to giggle, but even die-hard Wilder fans would have to admit that these scenes are pretty forced, and Gene Wilder yelling is only funny when we like the character he's playing. It doesn't help that, as a director, Wilder shoots everything in the flattest, most unimaginative ways.

The supporting cast is mostly wasted, especially Wilder's real-life partner, Gilda Radner, in a pretty thankless role as one of his co-workers who, through a misunderstanding, thinks he's interested in her. Joseph Bologna and Judith Ivey give the film much manic energy, yet they barely register. LeBrock is certainly fetching, but she's hardly worth throwing one's life away for. Only Charles Grodin scores some actual laughs—he's the one semi-bright spot in a movie that's basically a collection of the worst tropes of subpar '80s comedies—low dramatic stakes, TV-grade visuals, a lame bookend structure with voice-over narration, adolescent sex humor, PG-13-level peek-a-boo nudity, gags about wacky heavy metal/punk rock kids, and wall-to-wall awful soft-rock tunes serving as a soundtrack. In this case, the songs come courtesy of Stevie Wonder during his cheesiest period. We have Wonder and The Woman in Red to thank for 1984's most omnipresent obnoxious earworm, "I Just Called to Say I Love You," which won the Oscar for Best Original Song!!!!!