SOMEBODY TO LOVE could have been titled ‘Nobody to Love’, because its three main characters are locked in an endless waltz of disappointment.
Rosie Perez bounces through the movie as Mercedes, a taxi dancer who is hopelessly in love with Harry, a washed-up TV cowboy actor played by Harvey Keitel. She dances for dollars in a sleazy Hollywood bar, where one night she meets Ernesto (Michael Delorenzo) an earnest young gravedigger who loves her with all his heart.
He loves her so much, indeed, that after he has her name tattooed on his chest, he is still willing to watch her re-enact one of Harry’s best scenes.
Mercedes throws herself into the performance, which she has memorised from Harry’s dusty old video tapes. She plays two roles, lurching into the room and taking both sides in a shoot-out.
One character falls to the floor, mortally wounded, tries to call 911 and dies. And then, in a comic master-stroke, talking without moving her lips, she imitates the sound of a telephone left too long off the hook, and then does the operator: “If you want to make a call, please….”
Perhaps only Rosie Perez could play Mercedes, a compact tiny dynamo who climbs five-storey fire escapes to attend auditions and dreams of the break that will make her a star–“Like Harry,” she says, although Harry’s starring days are so long behind him that he’s hardly recognised n the bars where he drinks away his nights.
The constant disappointments are: Ernesto will never win Mercedes, Mercedes will never win Harry, and Harry will never leave his wife.
The movie, directed and co written by Alexander Rockwell, doesn’t much care; it’s not a love story but an episodic slice of low life, populated by a gallery of strange souls. Here you will see, for example, Steve Buscemi doing a surprisingly convincing role of playing Jackie, a transvestite who works in the same bar. You will see Stanley Tucci as Mercedes’ sleazy agent, faking phone calls.
You will see Quentin Tarantino on another stop in his inexhaustible world tour of other directors’ movies, playing a bartender with a theory about comedy . You will see Anthony Quinn as a lonely man who wanders over from his mother’s funeral to visit Ernesto in a grave that he is digging. You will see Perez in a duel to death with self-help tapes to improve her English pronunciation. You will see Keitel’s cowboy overjoyed to be cast in a cable movie named “The Life and Times of Tarzan,” only to learn he’s expected to wear a gorilla suit. You will see Keitel in leopard-skin underwear, mangling Shakespeare. And you will see the great director Sam Fuller crawl out of a wrecked Rolls-Royce, pop the cork on a bottle of champagne, and offer Mercedes his philosophy on Hollywood.
SOMEBODY TO LOVE doesn’t add up to very much. By denying itself the possibility of a happy ending, the movie leaves itself with nowhere much to go. But it has oodles of style with quirky writing, and amused with itself. Perez throws herself into her role as if her world depended on it. It’s not bleak, yet it’s a black comedy from 1994.
