Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton by Barry Keith Grant

Author:Barry Keith Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2009-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

10 (1981)

Toward the end of 10 (1979), Jennifer (Bo Derek), with whom George Webber (Dudley Moore) has been romantically obsessed throughout the film, seduces him, and they repair to bed to make love to the accompaniment, at Jennifer’s suggestion, of a record of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero.” They are interrupted by a telephone call from Jennifer’s husband, David (Sam J. Jones [David Hanley]), whose life George has earlier saved and who is now recuperating in the hospital. The effect of the call on George, who at once becomes unable to perform, significantly redefines our understanding of his sexual fantasy, which appears to have been close to realization. It has always been clear that, in the manner of such obsessions, George’s desire is fueled by private needs and intensities which are wholly indifferent to the real nature of the object onto whom they are projected, but it might have been thought—on the evidence of his daydreams and periodic investigations, through a telescope, of the sexual exploits of a neighbor in the house opposite his own—that his interest in Jennifer lay essentially in the prospect of a sexual fling. It transpires, on the contrary, that it is precisely Jennifer’s relaxed, hedonistic attitude to their encounter which George finds distressing. What he wants is exclusive romantic proprietorship—a relationship, in other words, identical in form to the one which dissatisfies him—and his discovery that, for Jennifer, the pleasures of the evening imply neither the betrayal of her husband nor renunciation of him in favor of permanent devotion to George, releases a torrent of self-righteous prudery: “There’s more to life than turning on and screwing to Ravel’s ‘Bolero.’”

We are not concerned, that is, with the revamping of the theme of “male menopause” to which the film, insofar as it has been discussed at all, has been reduced, if by male menopause we mean the last-ditch indulgence in irresponsible promiscuity which the phrase customarily denotes. George’s desires are more complex and contradictory than that. He wants monogamy all right, in the sense of being found “special,” and Jennifer’s response—“As far as I’m concerned, I’m very special”—helps to define George’s case as the familiar one of needing “love” for self-definition and ego-reinforcement, the ideal corollary of the acquired sense of “specialness” being the self-abnegation of the partner who bestows it. The untiring sexual prowess of his neighbor supplies merely an irritant, or catalyst, for a character whose Oedipal attachments are not to be invested, in Don Juan’s manner, in an eternally unsatisfied magpie acquisitiveness; yet, the scenario which has as its upshot George’s finding himself at last in bed with his ideal does bear all the hallmarks of the family romance.

George first sees Jennifer, in bridal white, en route to her wedding, and desire at once collides with the law in the wonderfully literal form of a police car. The frisson generated by the fantasy from the start derives from the fact that the image of Jennifer appears to reconcile virginal purity (no one has “had” her) and Oedipal prohibition (she is subject to another man).

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