Скачать или смотреть Strong Medicine (1981) of Richard Foreman (b. 1937)

Strong Medicine (1981)


Duration: 80 minutes

November 25, 1981
RICHARD FOREMAN'S 'STRONG MEDICINE'
By VINCENT CANBY
The New York Times

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RHODA, a slender, pale woman in a sensible dress and sensible shoes, is in a state. To describe her as being extremely upset would be an understatement, much like a psychiatrist's saying that someone who is in the process of committing suicide is suffering an anxiety attack. Slang is more accurate. Rhoda is very nearly out of her wig, though her hair is apparently her own.

Rhoda seems to be in a tacky ballroom, the guest of honor at her own birthday party, surrounded by uncaring strangers, her chilly, know-it-all doctor and her patronizing husband, who forces her to dance with the doctor. ''Faster, faster,'' says her husband, but the music has stopped. The guests sing a drear version of ''For She's a Jolly Good Fellow'' and an equally unenthusiastic ''Happy Birthday.''

Along with five or six other women, Rhoda crouches, one knee on the floor, as if to get ready-and-set for a foot race. When the ''Go!'' signal is given, the music starts up and the other wom en simply flop onto the floor. Rhoda tries to be patient, to understand, but obviously the system is designed to terrorize. Yet Rhoda will not be terrorized. With something of the unflappability of Lewis Carroll's Alice, she persists in seeing this dream through to the end.

This is more or less the outline of ''Strong Medicine,'' the first film to be made by the playwright-director Richard Foreman, one of America's most highly acclaimed theater innovators, the founder and director of the Ontological-Hysteria Theater. The film opens today at the Film Forum.

Like ''The Lovers' Exile,'' the filmed version of a production by Japan's Bunraku doll theater company now playing at the Public, ''Strong Medicine'' is more of a theatrical occasion than a cinematic one. Though Mr. Foreman, in notes supplied to the critic by the Film Forum, talks knowingly about the differences between theater ''space'' and screen ''space,'' ''Strong Medicine'' clearly is theater, but theater in which there are four walls instead of three.