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Arts & Entertainment Preview - June 1998 B Y   E L L A   T A Y L O R Suspicious Mind Eric Stoltz as a man obsessed Mistrust, all but done to death as a movie theme, receives a fresh coat of paint in Mr. Jealousy, a deceptively light romantic comedy from Noah Baumbach, the very young director with a very old head who made the 1995 art-house hit Kicking and Screaming. Eric Stoltz stars as Lester, a thirty-ish Manhattan substitute teacher and aspiring novelist who, after a formative experience with his first girlfriend, seems doomed to ruin all subsequent romances with his possessive behavior. When his soon-to-be-married friends Vince (a very funny Carlos Jacott) and Lucretia (Secrets and Lies's Marianne Jean-Baptiste, sporting a seamless American accent) introduce him to the free-spirited Ramona (Annabella Sciorra), the apparently reasonable Lester soon becomes obsessed with his new girlfriend's past lovers, especially the slick Dashiell (Chris Eigeman), author of a best-selling novel, The Sensualist. Joining Dashiell's therapy group under Vince's name to soak up data about his "rival," Lester mires himself in a thickening tissue of lies that threaten to destroy his relationships with those he cares for most. Baumbach's gracefully constructed screwball plot keeps doubling back on itself, expanding the boundaries of time and place to sustain a chronic instability that mirrors both the young man's insecurity and the ambivalent thrashing about that is modern love. The characters happen to be the same age as the director, but Mr. Jealousy is no Gen-X sitcom. In his precocious wisdom and the assurance of his touch, Baumbach recalls both Truffaut and early Woody Allen. Keep the Satire Flying Carter and Grant Robert Bierman's film version of George Orwell's novel of 1930s London, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, blandly retitled A Merry War for American moviegoers who may be stumped by the name of the houseplant that epitomizes lower-middle-class English respectability, is nevertheless a wickedly clever piece of satirical fun. Wearing his customary air of barely contained middle-class fury, Richard E. Grant plays discontented advertising copywriter Gordon Comstock, who, after a favorable review in the London Times of his slender volume of poetry, recklessly dumps his steady job to live out his idea of the artist's life. Despite all kinds of support from his level-headed girlfriend, Rosemary (played with rueful wit by Helena Bonham Carter), his long-suffering sister (Harriet Walter), and his patient publisher (Julian Wadham), a champagne socialist who loves the working class from a safe distance, Gordon's literary career fails to ignite. Convinced that success eludes him because he isn't moneyed or homosexual or a Communist, Gordon disgraces himself in a posh restaurant and flounces off to dwell among the glorious proletariat, until bedbugs and Rosemary return him to sanity and his assigned place in the order of things. Crisply adapted by the television writer Alan Plater, A Merry War is a handsome period piece that does full justice to Orwell's scorn for the pretensions and hypocrisies of England's hidebound class structure. One Last Look at Life Mastroianni (left) and Oliveira Marcello Mastroianni gave his last performance in Voyage to the Beginning of the World, a beautiful new film by the renowned and endlessly prolific Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who will turn ninety this year. Frail but entirely in command, Mastroianni plays Manoel, an aged film director who accompanies a half-French, half-Portuguese actor and two others to the village in Portugal where the actor's father was raised. As the four drive though the lovely countryside (the scenery achieves an intense life of its own), Manoel, by turns puckish, crusty, flirtatious, and wistful, reminisces about his own privileged youth in the same region. Moved by a roadside statue of a lonely man bearing a wooden beam on his back, Manoel reflects on how, with age and the passing of time, memory dominates a man's experience, yet without allowing him to grasp the past. "I know my own history, as if it belonged in another life," he tells his companions. As they reach the village, the focus shifts to the life of another Manoel--the actor's troubled father, whose story is told by an austere aunt, herself a relic of a dying rural world. In his connection with a blood relative, the actor makes peace with the father who died when he was young. For his part, the director, wandering among gravestones, achieves a more equivocal serenity. "A long life is a gift from God," he says. "But it has its price." Ella Taylor is a film critic for LA Weekly. Go to ... Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.