Loves of a Blonde, Lasky Plavovlasky

The most vile beliefs can come in neutered and pathetic and ridiculous packages, which is to say that anything can be cute, be funny, be the subject of a lighthearted movie. Anti-semitism can be a little old man, balling tiny fists, heroically alone in believing that Jews kill little boys, and racism can be my grandmother's feeble insistence on black servility. And sexism can be the men in Loves of a Blonde; it can be an aging charmer lobbying to move the army to a shoe factory town with 16 women for every man, pleading for a woman's right to be caressed. It can be an aspiring adulterer, crawling under tables chasing his wedding ring, peering up skirts like a gopher at the sky. The sexism of these guys is as hapless, as harmless and as sexless as a baby's.

But babies touch themselves, and they'd kill (rape) you if they had the strength. Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde does a terrific job of showing exactly how these man-babies aren't funny. A gap-toothed, gout gobbled thoroughly laughable doofus ends up bullying a couple of girls into finishing their wine, and there are forebodings of a forest where those girls don't want to go. There is an ex boyfriend running amok in the girls dorm. The air is thick with uncomfortably persistent men, with tugging hands, with the feeling that someone's going to be sexually assaulted. In a different movie, without the warbling soundtrack and fumbling, sweet characters, this could be the stuff of horror, and at moments it kind of is.

These men aren't actually rapists though, they're just sexually frustrated and out to do some dutiful caressing. They're the trickled down clowns of a sexist sexual politics they didn't invent, of one, rather, that is trying to invent them: they're supposed to be the "nice boys" the girls are lectured about, the ones who honor a "girl's honor," the ones a girl can "trust" for forever after. But this really sucks because nice boys and honorable girls are false roles embodying false ideals. They're roles that make women fear abandonment and men entrapment, that make boys connivers and girls dreaming dupes, that make the sexes into the bullies and the bullied. And, eventually, we see how those roles make women and men settle down into those crucibles of pettiness called marriages, and live with the dead-eyed bitterness that comes from getting trapped, or trapping someone into forever after, a partnership as dreary as any honest stereotype.

The movie had opened with two competing utopian visions of love: the credits roll while a wild-haired hog of a girl sings -- yells, really -- about a girl who turned the boy who loves her into a "hooligan" with her ballsy sexuality. Then it cuts to two hands, adoring and fondling a ring: "The real thing?" "You think he would give me anything else?" The sweet, sad thing is that both utopias are staged in the girls dorm in the factory town, the other sex safely sequestered in a lyric or a photograph.