Bohemian Rhapsody

By JAY COCKS

NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE

Directed and Written by PAUL MAZURSKY

It is 1953 and time for a change. Larry Lapinsky (Lenny Baker), 22 and just finished school, pulls up stakes. He shakes hands with Dad (Mike Kellin), kisses a resentful, concerned Mom (Shelley Winters) and leaves their small Brooklyn apartment for even smaller and certainly colder quarters in Greenwich Village. Larry wants to be an actor, and his departure is his first full step into la vie boheme. He dares not put on his beret, however, until he is safely on the subway.

Fond, canny, breakaway funny, Paul Mazursky's Next Stop, Greenwich Village is a comic reminiscence about salad days around Washington Square, the tough lessons and small victories that mark the end of growing up. What is best about Mazursky's work (Alex in Wonderland, Blume in Love, Harry and Tonto) comes from his affectionate kind of satire, always clear-eyed and almost never derisive. Mazursky is a good spirit, and this is perhaps the most closely autobiographical of all his movies. Like Larry, he was a scuffling New York actor (he showed up as one of the leads in Fear and Desire, Stanley Kubrick's first feature in 1953).

Larry has a girl named Sarah (Ellen Greene), who hangs around the Village smoking English Ovals and discussing her diaphragm. She always seems to be auditioning a freshly patented attitude of weary contempt toward matters of heart and head. After making love, Sarah tells Larry, "You were fine," sounding as personal as a weather report. Such an attitude generally passes for existential weariness, and indeed serious issues weigh heavily. "I think about suicide once or twice a day," Larry confides. "That's normal," Sarah counsels him. "Suicide makes you feel talented."

Fizzled Poseurs. Larry and Sarah's friends have a nodding acquaintance with both self-destruction and self-fulfillment. Robert (Christopher Walken) writes plays, lives off women; Connie (Dori Brenner) wants to be a novelist and plays nursemaid to her black gay pal Bernstein Chandler (Antonio Fargas), who claims his mother named him after the Jewish family for whom she worked 30 years as a maid. All of them keep an eye on the fragile, mad-eyed actress Anita (Lois Smith), who periodically attempts suicide.

The film is filled with familiar presences--the overbearing Jewish mother, the fizzled poseurs and intrepid novitiates of Greenwich Village. But Mazursky places his characters in situations where nuance, not novelty, makes the scene ring true. When Mrs. Lapinsky shows up at Larry's apartment with a couple of shopping bags full of food, the vignette seems at first too recognizable. Any mother would bring along a chicken. But only Mrs. Lapinsky would present it snuggled in a pot, surrounded with potatoes and vegetables all cleaned and carefully cut, ready for the front burner. The scene becomes a classic car toon with a new caption.

Few American film makers cast actors as shrewdly as Mazursky. Newcomers Baker and Greene have just the right quality of brassiness and sudden childishness, Winters is brazenly hilarious as Mom, the group of friends as true as old snapshots. Especially notable is Lois Smith, who can scare you, tickle you, make you cry, almost at the same in stant. Jeff Goldblum, as a devoted disciple of the Actors Studio whose Method bravado undoes him, appears in only two scenes but carries them both away. Mazursky permits, even encourages such larceny. It only enriches his already bountiful comedy.

Jay Cocks

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