CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
JAMES LEVEN’S film Don Juan de Marco offers a refreshingly different viewpoint of a patient/psychiatrist relationship to the grim one taken by Peter Shaffer in Equus. Almost perversely, Leven eschews reality and opts for fantasy. In the course of 10 days, the patient Johnny/Juan not only transforms, with wonderfully serpentine subtlety, his psychiatrist into a fantasist but also gives him a new understanding into himself.
Johnny (flamboyantly played by an appropriately gorgeous Johnny Depp) imagines himself to be Don Juan, the greatest lover in the world. There is a delicious play both on the career of the legendary lover and on Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Quite apart from the use of important names taken from the opera, we hear La ci darem mano (the Don’s attempt to seduce Zerlina) on the soundtrack. Juan, after more than 1 500 conquests, is prepared to take his own life because Donna Anna, the woman of his dreams, has refused him. In the opera, it is the revengeful Donna Anna who seeks Giovanni out and vows eternal retribution. The sexual ambiguities in the opera are wittily turned inside out.
Juan wishes to die at the hands of Don Francisco, the greatest swordsman in the world, but is forced to settle for Don Ottavio (who is Anna’s ineffectual betrothed in Don Giovanni). Ottavio is played by Marlon Brando who is, in fact, a psychiatrist who is preparing to take early retirement. For a few marvellous minutes, Brando adopts a Spanish accent, and here, as in The Freshman, where he is the tutor of the youthful Matthew Broderick, he is not only Don Ottavio, but Don Corleone, in this instance an amiable surrogate- godfather. There are some good-natured digs at his weight: Brando makes Orson Welles look like a pygmy, but like Welles he is a vast brooding figure of film mythology and Leven exploits this to the hilt.
This quite heady film affirms the value of love at first sight. The first time Juan’s parents meet in El Mexico — as Juan, who knows all along that he was born in Phoenix, Arizona, claims — they burst into song and dance. All the fantasy scenes are filmed in warm, flesh colours: reds, saffrons and golds.
Depp not only wears a mask, in atonement for his father’s death for which he feels responsible, but he also appears in drag with yashmak instead of mask, looking even more desirable here than he did angora- clad in Ed Wood and once again establishing himself as the “outsider”, the man/actor who does not conform to social conventions or for that matter to Hollywood
Brando, with hair dyed blonde, is moved by his patient to embark together with his wife on a “flight of eagles”. The wife is played by a remarkably well preserved and beautiful Faye Dunaway with whom Brando shares two wonderfully funny love scenes, the second involving popcorn, put to better use than in most movie
The film claims that there is no reason why dreams should not come true: “Why not?” Brando quizzically asks. Indeed, the whole film demonstrates Johnny’s transfiguring influence on everyone he meets. In a restaurant, he transforms a woman’s hand into her whole body and soul. Later in the film, a fleeting glimpse of her tells us just how potent his impact on her has been. At the psychiatric institution Woodshaven in the Burrough of Queens, a butch male nurse with his large feet firmly set on the ground is persuaded to go to Madrid, the female nurse moves about in a slow motion trance, and one of the more conventional psychiatrists is thrown into a complete double-bind.
I, for one, am fully prepared to believe in the powers of the miraculous Arabian bird that is able to rise from its own ashes. Don Juan de Marco, whose irresistible hero hails from Phoenix, is half-fact, half-fantasy, and pure enchantment.