DVD Review: James Toback’s When Will I Be Loved onMGM Home Entertainment

Though not as personal as his Black and White, James Toback’s When Will I Be Loved, about a young hustler (Frederick Weller) intent on renting out his girlfriend (Neve Campbell) to an Italian count (Dominic Chianese), is every bit as whip-smart. Its pacing is like that of a screwball comedy, but its commentary is obscenely vicious. Toback has always struck this critic as presumptuous, and while others have questioned his conflation of black and white culture, this film makes a very strong case that no other white director has so thoughtfully observed the sociological zones where black and white lives intersect.

Essentially an Indiewood version of Indecent Proposal, When Will I Be Loved sets up the viewer for a sucker punch from the start, with Vera (Campbell) and Ford (Weller) each making their way back to her apartment from different parts of New York City. It’s as if we’re watching dueling boxers making their way to the ring, with Toback coding strengths and weaknesses in the power struggles and sexual diversions that sweep them up along the way.

The presence of numerous black characters (and cameos by black athletes and actors) throughout first struck me as specious, but then I realized that Toback is less interested in the differences between races than he is with the differences between rich and poor. Indeed, every interaction in When Will I Be Loved seemingly plays out as an ugly bid for privileged status.

Maybe it’s the rich milieu, or perhaps it’s Toback’s obsession with sex and money, but there’s something distinctly “French” about the film’s vernacular. Toback admits that his unconscious fascination with Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour informs the ferociously independent daddy’s girl played by a splendid Campbell, but it’s the film’s deceptively playful tone and Toback’s provocative illumination of sexual and identity politics that more closely aligns the film to Jean-Claude Brisseau’s outstanding Secret Things.

Toback’s ideas on sex, class, and gender sometimes go nowhere and everywhere at once. Which means that your mileage will vary. For some, it will be a spoken-word performance gone horribly wrong, but I can’t think of a more transfixing and complex ballet of images, sounds, and politics all year than Campbell’s ingenious femme fatale seducing and destroying two presumptuous men at once by using her perceived female weaknesses against them.

Image/Sound

Image quality on this When Will I Be Loved DVD is a little on the warm side; skin tones are somewhat pinkish, but there’s no evidence of color bleeding anywhere in sight, even when Neve Campbell’s bright red couch takes center stage. Some dirt and flecks are noticeable, but mostly around chapter stops-it’s as if someone came in to clean your apartment but forgot to sweep beneath the doorways. The Dolby Digital 5.1 track is crisp through and through, though there’s still no excusing the shoddy ADR-work that kicks off chapter seven.

Extras

James Toback is a smart dude, but his commentary doesn’t suggest a director reflecting on his own film but a professor deconstructing someone else’s work for a roomful of students. This is not to say this is a boring track. In fact, it’s downright hysterical. For example, when Campbell is seen masturbating with the shower head in the film’s opening scene, Toback observes how the “orgasm is suggested by the twitching of the muscles from behind.” No kidding! If Toback seems to talk down to his audience, his sense of humor consistently lightens the mood-the highlight of the track may be when he goes off on films that don’t cast actors who look like each other when playing characters that are related. Rounding out the disc are “scene sexplorations” with Campbell and Toback, the film’s original theatrical trailer, and additional trailers for Code 46 and Wicker Park.

Overall

Jeffrey Lyons may be quoted on the front cover, but a real critic (ahem) is quoted on the back.