TRUE LOVE: PRELUDE TO A KISS, THE WATERDANCE
Hollywood has never been afraid of romance, but is deathly afraid of love. That statement is not a contradiction in terms. Romantic movies have normally about the trappings, from candy to flowers to sex, and not about the real feelings, or the pain and sorrow that love can bring. In MOONSTRUCK, Nicholas Cage's character gives a speech about love in that it brings you nothing but heartbreak, but it's worth doing anyway. Still, it's rare for other movies to take that point of view. Two of them that do are Norman Rene's PRELUDE TO A KISS, and Neal Jimenez and Michael Steinberg's THE WATERDANCE, and while the two could not be more diametrically opposed - one's a romantic fantasy, the other a disease-of-the-week movie - they both get at the pain of true love.
Rene's film is adapted from Craig Lucas' hit play, marking their second collaboration (they worked on the AIDS drama LONGTIME COMPANION in 1990) Unlike that one, which was a realistic look at how AIDS affected a small group of people, this is a fable, which is hard to pull off on film. Yet despite a couple of missteps, they manage to do so.
Alec Baldwin, reprising his role from the play, is Peter, who manages a company that publishes microfiche for scientific journals. One night, at a party, he meets Rita (Meg Ryan, taking over for Mary-Louise Parker), a bartender who wants to be a graphic designer. They're quietly attracted to one another (played out during a scene set to Cowboy Junkies' haunting cover of "Sweet Jane"), even though they have differences. He's trying to forget his past (he once told his father he was going to a movie, and he went to Europe instead). Even though she's a free spirit, she's scared of her future (she can't sleep) or anyone's future (she doesn't want to bring kids into this world). On an impulse, they decide to get married, and everything on the surface seems fine, especially since he gets along with her parents (Ned Beatty and Patty Duke).
Then on the wedding day, what seems like an innocent event turns out to be not so innocent. An old man (Sydney Walker) has wandered off from his daughter (Kathy Bates) and son-in-law (Richard Riehle), being tired of being old. He happens upon the wedding (it's at Rita's parents' house), and when the other guests take notice of him and notice he's not a guest, stammers simply that he wants to kiss the bride. Rita, feeling pity for him, agrees. What happens after the kiss, of course, is when things go crazy. Their souls exchange, so now Rita is inside the old man, and the old man is inside Rita. Peter, naturally, starts to notice things are different when Rita not only uses out-of-date phrases, but forgets important details (a catchphrase he taught her, plus how to make a Long Island iced tea), and lives with a joie de vivre that's out of character for her - or, at least, what he knows of her. When he returns from their honeymoon in despair, he goes to the bar where she works, and finds the old man, who now has Rita inside him.
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