MOVIE REVIEW : A LITTLE SUN SHINES ON RAINCITY

Editor’s Note: “Trouble in Mind,” which opens today at Mann’s Westwood, played for a week’s Oscar-qualifying run in December, when it was reviewed by Film Critic Sheila Benson. Following are excerpts from that review.

Welcome to RainCity, Alan Rudolph’s Casablanca, where the bad are baaad, the good are good, where love is never easy and “if a man looked at a woman’s mouth before her eyes, he’d get fooled a lot less.”

Outrageous, audacious and endearing by turns, “Trouble in Mind” is a full-blown romance, set in the sort of future and in the past of a hundred films noirs . It has lovers-in-innocence (Lori Singer, Keith Carradine), lovers-in-experience (Kris Kristofferson, Genevieve Bujold), lovers of trouble (Divine, Joe Morton) and the mysterious RainCity, which draws them all and blurs the lines between them. It may look like Seattle; to writer-director Rudolph it’s the faintly ominous, semi-seedy City.

As Rudolph glides from good world to evil one; as Kristofferson (as Hawk, his reluctant detective-knight), must go into the fray once again, the director’s control is lovely. The film drips with a pulp-romance feeling; with the bittersweet rasp of Marianne Faithfull’s songs, Mark Isham’s shimmering score and the glory of cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita’s muted colors. But there is a tart, cheerful undertone of ironic, sometimes outrageous humor to keep us from sugaring out.

Part of it is sure, quick character vignettes; part is visual wit and part is terribly funny staging. Finally, “Trouble” has a pair of lovers whose future you agonize about. How long since we cared anything about a couple on the screen?