MOVIE REVIEW : All the World’s a Road Show for the Lovers in ‘Bail Jumper’

Supposedly, when you’re in love, the world goes away. Not so in “Bail Jumper” (at the Monica 4-Plex). In this oddball low-budget road movie, the world won’t let its lovers alone.

The movie’s misfit pair, Joe and Elaine, played by B. J. Spalding and Eszter Balint (the displaced siren of “Stranger Than Paradise”), are a pretty boy-thug Romeo and a bail-jumper Juliet who meet in a city called Murky Springs, Mo.

Both of them are a little disconnected. Joe pulls inept heists; Elaine claims to be the daughter of country-and-Western singers. (From where? Hungary?) They hit the road one step ahead of the law, and soon discover they can’t escape the universe: Wherever they go, it mirrors their emotional turmoil. A tornado drives them away, a meteorite strikes their car en route. When they reach New York, Staten Island almost vanishes under a tidal wave, and soon they’re in a solar eclipse that just won’t stop.

Mad love is often a kind of ultimate joint egotism; here we’ve gone to the far extreme. The movie plays like the psychotic fantasy of a guy who wakes up, sees cloudy skies and is convinced the bad weather is directed at him-- or of lovers who expect the Earth to crack open when they quarrel. It’s the poet’s Pathetic fallacy gone screw-loose, and co-writer/director Christian Faber makes “Bail Jumper” into an inchoate mix of crazy fantasy and typical “love-on-the-run” road movie.

Like all those filmmakers who make “Bonnie and Clyde”/”Badlands” clones--most of which are bad and some of which are “Drugstore Cowboy”--Faber seems to believe the world’s a stage for his lovers. He traps the couple in a film noir flashback, so we’ll guess they’re heading toward doom. Midway through, he brings in an off-roads clairvoyant (Joie Lee, Spike’s sister) to predict the rest of the story. Even, it seems, if these love-and-runners get through the locust swarm, the car chase and the flood, they’re still rushing toward a kiss-bang destiny.

Oddly enough, “Bail Jumper,” made for less than $400,000, shares many failings and strengths of big-budget movies. It has an archetypal plot, buddies on the road, sex and violence. The effects are surprisingly effective, the visuals slick and catchy; the cinematographer, Tomasz Magierski, is very talented. But the acting and writing are pretty bad throughout, the characterizations thin as sleet--except for Balint, who has a wacko beauty, and Tony Askin, who, as Joe’s closet-case buddy, Dan, turns his weak part into a succession of amusing caricature grimaces.

Ultimately, “Bail Jumper” (Times-rated Mature for sex, language and violence) is pseudo avant-garde pop: SoHo loft theater mixed with a loony high concept and a weird psycho edge. These lovers wandering around while the world explodes are like Schwarzenegger or Stallone bopping a hundred villains at a crunch: They’re possessed with the senseless omnipotence of the superstar. The world is always dancing, or crashing, to their tune.