Director: Howard Avedis
Writers: Leah Appet from a story by Leah Appet, Howard Avedis, and Marlene Schmidt
From: Cult Cinema
A drama about a couple facing the disintegration of their marriage and their business.
From the director of the pedophilic The Teacher and the tonally inconsistent The Specialist comes a domestic drama handled with all the subtlety and care you’d expect. Honestly, it’s not so bad as that, nor is it as good either.
Ken and Valentine Colby are in a bit of a rut in their marriage. Their first child is starting school and Valentine wants to get out of the house and become more active, either through joining Ken at the car dealership he inherited or by going back to school. Ken is trying to keep the dealership afloat through a new ad campaign and by giving the bank the runaround about a loan he’s been mismanaging.
Valentine catches Ken having an affair and then hooks up with someone herself. She confronts Ken with what she knows and tells him about her indiscretion as well, and leaves him to prove she can fend for herself. She picks up a job as a cocktail waitress at a burlesque bar and finds that she can manage it. Meanwhile, Ken loses the shop.
Valentine quits her job around the same time and comes back home. The couple try to work it out and the whole family goes to the race track that weekend to see Ken race in a car he built with his friend. Ken wins the race and the family walks off together, happy. THE END
I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m so down on this movie, and certainly part of it is because so very little happens. There’s very little struggle or sense of weight to anything. Ken is straight-up lying to the bank about how many cars he has on the lot, but the fact that this action could lead to the business being foreclosed upon never comes up. Likewise Valentine’s job at the cocktail bar is, I think, supposed to be read as sordid or degrading, but it comes across as a job in an environment that she, despite herself, kind of enjoys. The bouncer flirts with her a little bit, but the moment she tells him “no,” he leaves her alone with no animosity.
She enters a sordid world with a thorough and nonchalant respect for consent. I mean, I was really happy to see that, but also disappointed because it sidestepped any opportunity for drama. Which is when I realized the issue I take with this movie:
Separate Ways has an exploitation film sensibility while not being an exploitation film. The movie is a domestic drama but has the leering tone of impending titillation. “Hey, she’s working at a burlesque bar. You know what that means!” “What’s this have to do with her husband lying to their son about where she is?” “Oh, yeah, we did foreground that as an issue, didn’t we?”
That’s an issue as well: the husband isn’t that villainous, or at least isn’t played up as being villainous. Losing the business is a concern and something to explore in a dramatic narrative, but the movie keeps him and his issues in the background. Then he has the affair, is never fully communicative with Valentine, and lies to the kid about where mom is—a move, of which she accuses him, that turns the kid into a pawn in the argument between them. Only he’s not trying to make any abusive moves, he’s someone muddling his way through a bad situation.
And that’s fine. You can have a movie without villains that doesn’t try to make every decision life-or-death or carry some moral weight, but you do need to fully realize and expand upon these characters and their situation. I spent a good chunk of the movie just wandering what it was supposed to be about. Once the separation finally came, there wasn’t much time left in the movie to resolve it in any meaningful way.
So I wouldn’t recommend the movie. It didn’t offend me the way some of these others have. In fact, I was surprised at how much the movie showed characters respecting consent. I even started to wonder if I don’t want to see movies that respect consent because, if this movie’s an example, it seems to strip all of the drama. It doesn’t, though. You just need to make sure the drama of your piece is in the foreground. This movie didn’t do that. You should let it remain in the background as well.
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