-== SOMEBODY TO LOVE ==-

Alexandre Rockwell's treacly, trifling Somebody To Love sat on the shelf without distribution for more than a year, and it's easy to see why--it's a patronizing mess. Somewhere around the time, feisty, heart-of-gold taxi dancer (you pay her, she dances with you) Mercedes (Rosie Perez) burbles "Don't give up on me, God!" at the night sky, we know we're in trouble. This is secondhand-movie hell, where the characters are all ludicrous stereotypes, and where young filmmakers make movies about "little people," oblivious to their own condescension. Like Rockwell's Sundance hit In the Soup, Somebody To Love has its moments--many, in fact, repeated from that earlier film--but his vision is, by and large, a wet towel of strained whimsy. He hasn't been blessed with the mysteriously hallowed profile of fellow Four Rooms felon Allison Anders (who takes the cake as the indie emperor's new clothes), but his achievements are just as paltry. Rockwell squanders an awful lot of talent too: I wouldn't put the director himself on the list, but his cast includes Rosie Perez, Harvey Keitel, Stanley Tucci, Steve Buscemi, and legendary cult director Sam Fuller. The story tracks Mercedes' trials and tribulations as she bounces from one sleazeball romantic partner to another, and from one disastrous attempt after another to break out of taxi dancing (taxi dancing?) and into showbiz proper. She dallies with a cretinous has-been TV star (Keitel), indulges a starry-eyed Latino who fell in love with her during a dance, and sips champagne on a roadside with a crotchety movie producer (Fuller) who offers her a role and then dies on the spot. Mobsters, horny agents, transvestites, fatal romance, the Virgin of Guadaloupe--Rockwell stops short of wise, elfin homeless people, but it's hard to imagine why he bothered. Though she refuses to surrender in her quest for fame, Mercedes herself is apparently quite talentless; we're supposed to admire her gumption when, in fact, we wish she would go get a real job and stop putting us through the mill. All the while, Perez keeps sticking her chin out in a preposterous demonstration of "the human spirit" or something, but her breasts are featured so prominently in every scene you begin to expect them to have lines of their own. Rockwell likes to pronounce Cassavetes and Fellini as his two influences--which merely means he overindulges actors and indulges himself with fanciful, underwritten stories. But what rankles most in Somebody To Love is Rockwell's obvious self-superiority over his low-life characters: they're the lovable, stupid forest creatures, and Rockwell is their Marlon Perkins, watching them through binoculars with a sympathetic smirk on his face. Is there anything more grating than a young, advantaged moviemaker casting his eye fondly upon "spunky" losers, especially as they paddle pathetically around the edges of the showbiz pond he inhabits so comfortably? Rockwell (whose grandfather, by the by, was eminent animator Alexander Alexieff) is the nineties indie scene's Damon Runyon, and that's no compliment. --Michael Atkinson

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