MOVIE REVIEW : SCHYGULLA WASTED IN ‘FOREVER, LULU’

Whatever possessed Hanna Schygulla, one of the great screen actresses of her time, to accept a hopeless trifle like “Forever, Lulu” (Beverly Center Cineplex) for her American screen debut? She must not have seen its writer-director Amos Kollek’s previous and equally awful “Goodbye, New York.”

It’s true that Schygulla attempted to expand her horizons beyond such extraordinary collaborations with R. W. Fassbinder as “Effi Briest,” “The Marriage of Maria Braun” and “Lili Marleen” even before his untimely death in 1982. It’s true, too, that she has done fine work for such varied and major European directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Ettore Scola, Margarethe von Trotta and Andrzej Wajda. But “Forever, Lulu” is the kind of film that sinks rather than launches international careers. It’s also enough to make Fassbinder turn over in his grave because it embodies the kitsch mentality that he and Schygulla so successfully skewered.

She plays a German-born New Yorker so down on her luck that during a heavy downpour she pulls out a gun, preparing to shoot herself. However, a passing couple thinks she’s holding them up and as a result, Schygulla is plunged into instant wealth, danger and a celebrity that gets her previously rejected novel published.

But since we’re told it’s a serious novel, why is she now considered competition for Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz? Why, too, doesn’t she quickly move out of the dreariest walk-up on the Lower East Side?

Were Garson Kanin to have done a rewrite and if George Cukor was still around to direct her, Schygulla might just have gotten by with “Forever, Lulu” as the kind of old-fashioned romp that gives serious actresses a chance to be clotheshorses and indulge in silliness without losing their dignity. But Kollek is so inept that the film is one long embarrassment for anyone who ever admired Schygulla. It isn’t that she herself is so terrible but that the circumstances are; her earthy, witty deadpan delivery is so completely at odds with the flighty kook she’s playing that you can’t help but think how much better casting Goldie Hawn would have been. (A tasteless scene with Schygulla and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, playing herself, boggles the mind.)

As if all this weren’t dreadful enough, “Forever, Lulu” also wastes another striking blonde, Deborah Harry, who pops up throughout the picture as the woman the bad guys are really after. The one good thing you can say for “Forever, Lulu” (rated R for a few four-letter words, some nudity) is that in its final sequence, involving a holdup of Caswell-Massey, none of the huge antique bottles in that historic pharmacy are broken.