One from the Heart

Coppola’s avant-garde musical with Teri Garr and Nastassja Kinski

A couple who’s been living together for five years in Las Vegas has a tiff (Teri Garr & Frederic Forrest). As they grieve their heartbreak, they flirt with alternative lovers on July 4th (Raul Julia & Nastassja Kinski).

“One from the Heart” (1981) was Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up to his incredible “Apocalypse Now” (1979). It’s a romantic musical shot entirely on a large sound stage (with one sequence done in the back lot) of Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, a studio by artists for artists. It’s in the tradition of the outstanding “Moulin Rouge” (1952) and the precursor to the dynamic “Chicago” (2002), but it lacks the compelling story of the former and the electricity of the latter.

Coppola was excited about using experimental video equipment to view/edit the movie and it certainly looks good, but the story is simplistic, which no doubt was the point in order for the viewer to focus on the artistic visuals and pleasant lounge music (by Tom Waits featuring Crystal Gayle). Nevertheless, the story is dull and Forrest lacks the charm to play a leading man, although Raul is charismatic. On the female front, Garr looks great as she nears the end of her physical prime and this is perhaps the best film to view Nastassja’s beauty.

While the film has its partisans and is certainly worth checking out for the reasons noted, it flopped upon release and it took Coppola a decade to recover financially. But I respect Francis for his experimental drive. They can’t all be hits.

The movie runs 1 hour, 47 minutes.

GRADE: C

"Hank" (Fredric Forrest) and girlfriend "Frannie" (Terri Garr) seem to have one of those relationships that is on, then it's off, then it's on again. After five years of this, there's some love there, but there's also loads of restlessness and it's ultimately that which drives them apart. She hooks up with the swarthy "Ray" (Raul Julia) while he takes a shine to "Leila" (Nastassia Kinski). It's this latter relationship that proves the marginally more entertaining in this otherwise unremarkable drama. "Leila" works in a circus and is regularly performing death-defying feats in a big top that is clearly just an huge sound stage. There we hit on what makes this film a little more notable - it has all been filmed on a stage. It's very much presented as if it were a stage play, even down the lighting fades and the use of music to help get us from one scenario to the other. The production design and technical effects work well to create that image but they can't compensate for a really thin story that neither Garr nor Forrest really add very much too. A sort of five-year-itch romance that rarely raises a laugh and looks entirely fake from start to finish. Whilst I don't doubt that was the aim of Francis Ford Coppola it merely seems to serve his own ambitions to prove he can make something quite this faux-continuous and sterile, rather than aspire to actually engaging with the audience on any meaningful level. It's under-written and under-developed from a character perspective and try as I did, I just didn't much care for it - one way or the other.