Choose Me

Rudolph here brings his variation on the kaleidoscopic Altman style to perfection with a marvellous gloss on La Ronde set in a Los Angeles bar that seems real but serves as a neon-lit dream world where everyone - not least Bujold's agony aunt, solving other people's problems but herself suffering untold miseries of sexual frustration - sooner or later turns up in quest of the partner who will bring emotional fulfilment, only to discover that it isn't necessarily there just for the asking. Often very funny as well as gorgeous to look at in its ineffable blend of realism and rhapsody, it comes on a little like a free jazz improvisation on the vulnerability of the human heart to the ecstasies and disenchantments that attend it in permanent orbit.