Holding Hands

By John Skow

FIRST LOVE

Directed by Joan Darling

Screenplay by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

and David Freeman

This is a pleasant, inoffensive, somewhat dim little film that stakes everything on charm, its only asset, and just barely breaks even. William Katt and Susan Dey play a couple of college students who fall in love, with what seems to them great intensity. They have a lot of fun, have less fun (she has been having an affair with an older man, and it flares up briefly), get back together and have fun again, and then part. We see only a little way below the surfaces (pink, unblemished skin, as the mattress scenes make clear) of these untroubled characters. But that is all right, because it does not seem likely that much remains hidden.

The action is so amiable and so inconsequential--he plays soccer, they talk about orgasms, his funny sidekick loses a cuff link--that the viewer falls to musing, as if he were not watching a film but sitting beside a small, shallow pond on a sunny day. One thought that crosses the wandering mind is that it is odd to watch people having intercourse. Since this is not a porno flick, the viewer cannot escape the ludicrous notion that he has invaded the lovers' privacy. They are real people, and if he walked in on their love-making in real life, he would say, "Oops," or "Nice day for it," or nothing, as the situation seemed to require, and shut the door. Since this is a theater, he stays in his seat but feels uncomfortable.

Other vagrant notions include wondering why the script calls for the girl to be rich, and asking why there are so many more rich people in novels and films than in the real world. The answer comes like a flash: rich people have big houses with extensive grounds, so there's more to photograph. Two-room apartments are dull visually, and even seven-room colonials are not very interesting.

It is agreeable to muse like this, and sure enough, another thought wafts into the viewer's skull, like an owl through an open window (Katt and Dey are in bed again, but it's not going very well).

The movie was taken from a Harold Brodkey short story called Sentimental Education, set in 1957 at Harvard. The lov ers were Harvard people, and they were 1957 people; they slept together, for in stance, but they worried a little about the Tightness of this and about the cam pus cop. The movie lovers are students at one of those all-purpose movie campuses -- No-Name U.-- and their bland speech, dress and attitudes are not really tied to any particular year. Why? Tex ture is important; if Harvard's class of '57 was wrong for the film, why not make it Michigan State's class of '77? But the houselights have lit, the lovers have part ed as insubstantially as they loved, and the viewer gets up to leave. He enjoyed himself very much.

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