Review: When Will I Be Loved

Though not as personal as his Black and White, James Toback’s When Will I Be Loved is every bit as visually curt.

When Will I Be Loved
Photo: IFC Films

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.

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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.

Score: 
 Cast: Neve Campbell, Dominic Chianese, Frederick Weller, Ashley Shelton, James Toback, Alex Feldman, Brandon Sommers, Mike Tyson, Lori Singer  Director: James Toback  Screenwriter: James Toback  Distributor: IFC Films  Running Time: 81 min  Rating: R  Year: 2004  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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