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Trouble in Mind (1985)

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From Time Out Film Guide

After the witty, emotional roundelay of Choose Me, Rudolph here plunges even further into his own imaginative world, and the result is wonderful. Located in a mythic, dangerous 'Rain City', his tenderly observed characters pick their way through the battlefield of love, all in search of their peculiar fulfilment. Former cop Hawk (Kristofferson) completes his prison sentence for killing a mobster and returns to his favourite haunt, a café run by old flame Wanda (Bujold). There he falls for a blonde princess (Singer), while she loses touch with her recklessly ambitious hubby (ebulliently played by Carradine, sporting increasingly wacky hairdos as he falls deeper into criminal ways). Forever in the background lurks mean fat cat Hilly, a local Sydney Greenstreet (unexpectedly incarnated by a poised Divine). Rudolph's script is both playful and precise, his images fantastic yet real, the music elegiac but ecstatically sung by an impassioned Marianne Faithfull. Part thriller, part comic fantasy, part love story, Trouble in Mind even offers an ambiguous, high-flown ending that suggests this really is the stuff that dreams are made of.

Author: DT

Time Out Film Guide

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Godfrey Hamilton said...

Posted on Dec 30 2010 01:31 I never forgot TO's review, it impressed me so much back in 1985 that I trotted off to the Screen on the Green immediately and sat enthralled throughout the movie (some inspired wag at the cinema had thoughtfully chosen Marianne Faithfull's Dangerous Acquantances to play as pre-show music, making the point that the mood of this brilliant movie was in large measure down to Mark Isham and La Faithfull's terrific musical contribution). 'Rain City' is of course Seattle, and my subsequent visits and working trips to that terrific city confirm that Rudolph had his finger on some sort of psychic pulse and sensed what was about to emerge in American urban society as well as in its political life. The liner notes, by Rudolph, for the new American DVD release, make his prescience and sensitivity quite clear - in the imagined city where the future meets the past in an ecstatic present, he found his metaphorical understanding of exactly where the United States was headed.

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