Personal Best

The sort of nerve required to produce an excellent screenplay like Chinatown seems to have deserted Towne in this, his directorial debut. A hesitation in dealing fully with the central relationship, coupled with an over-reliance on slow-motion photography, finds the film losing momentum almost before it leaves the starting blocks. Having set up a lesbian relationship between two athletes preparing for the Olympics (Hemingway and Donnelly) which promises to explore the effect of competition and rivalry in the context of physical surrender and gentle intimacy, it trickles away, foundering on such scenes as a first evening spent arm-wrestling, boozing, belching and farting, too reminiscent of the rugby locker room to be a convincing prelude to any sort of love affair. The thesis collapses into banal presumptions as jarring as the superfluous close-ups of undulating thighs and quivering crotches.