When Humor Meets Heartbreak

By RICHARD CORLISS

Talk is the sex of the '80s. In a time when you can hardly initiate a handshake without a note from your doctor, conversation is not just a white- collar mating dance; it is the most intimate form of safe sex. Over the telephone or a restaurant table, a man and a woman expose their emotions, exchange seminal fears and desires, make each other laugh and sob -- all without touching any organ but the heart. Talk is the consummation devoutly to be wished; no wonder they call it intercourse. It is confession without penance, therapy on the cheap. It is also, in the right mouths, the last civilized popular art.

Wit, conflict, a little sex. Good stuff for a movie? Good enough for a pair of terrific movies: When Harry Met Sally . . . , written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner; and sex, lies, and videotape, written and directed by Steven Soderbergh. Their characters are quick and engaging; they could be the thirtysomething folks on a good day, in a gilded mirror. As Ephron says, "People who live in cities aren't in car chases. We don't get shot at. What we mainly do is talk on the phone and have dinner." Her film and sex, lies serve up the urban scene at its most urbane. Clean taxis and great apartments appear in a trice, and no one's upscale job deprives him of quality time for soul scratching. But in both films the surface prettiness is just a device; it clears the cityscape of its daily detritus to focus on what matters: love, sex and friendship.

When Ephron met Reiner to discuss a script, she recalls, the director said, "I want to do a movie about two people who become friends and are really happy they become friends because they realize that if they had had sex it would have ruined everything. And they have sex and it ruins everything." Start with randy Harry (Billy Crystal) and precise Sally (Meg Ryan) in the Manhattan of your dreams, at the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But are they aware that falling in like can be as dangerous as falling in love? Reiner, who based the film partly on his life after being divorced from actress Penny Marshall, thinks he knows: "People say, 'Vive la difference,' but it's more like a cruel joke created by God. Men and women desperately want to be with each other, but at the same time they can't stand each other and don't understand each other."

So Harry and Sally go to movies together, confide romantic traumas, even try double-dating with their respective best friends (funny Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher) -- all the while fending off the inevitable erotic attraction. When they do surrender sexually, it is just what Harry feared. "The 'during' part was good," he admits. But postcoitally, while she glows, he glowers. He realizes that as friends they had been making love, with words and caring. Going to bed with Sally was just having sex. And now, like any guy who got what he came for, he wants out.

Like Harry and Sally, the movie is hardworking, spot on; it winepresses its conversation into epigrams. No surprise here. Reiner found wayward comedy in such genres as the rock documentary (This Is Spinal Tap) and the historical romance (The Princess Bride). Crystal, the improv master who is Reiner's closest friend -- "We finish each other's sentences," Crystal says, "and he finishes my lunch" -- meets the challenge of making a compulsive Lothario not just likable but impishly seductive. And Ephron, a helpful Heloise of emotional heartburn, perks the script with clever answers to modern problems. How long should a man hold a woman after making love to her? "Somewhere between 30 seconds and all night." What doubt nags at any woman who lets Mr. Right get away? "You'll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that someone else is married to your husband." What is the guilty secret of married life? "No sex."

No sex? No problem. In sex, lies, and videotape, Soderbergh suggests that abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. Ann (Andie MacDowell) is a Baton Rouge, La., housewife too decorous to go mad. Things with her lawyer husband John (Peter Gallagher) are fine, she tells her therapist, "except I'm havin' this feeling that I don't want him to touch me." They haven't had sex for a while. At least Ann hasn't; John is pursuing an affair with her lubricious sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). Curiosity is about the only thing that can be aroused in gentle Ann, and when John's chum Graham (James Spader) visits, she and he swap secrets. Hers: "I think that sex is overrated." His: "I'm impotent." They could be a couple for the '90s: the first postsexual lovers.

To describe the plot -- in which we learn that Graham can reach sexual climax only while watching videotapes he has made of women's carnal confessions -- is to make sex, lies sound like a smirking stag reel. But this is not an "adult film" in the X-rated sense; it is an adult film, "patient and subtle," in its creator's apt words. It is about men who use women by watching them, and women tired of being the object of satyric attention. What amazes is that at just 26, Soderbergh displays the three qualities associated with mature filmmakers: a unique authorial voice, a spooky camera assurance, and the easy control of ensemble acting (Andie MacDowell, start polishing your acceptance speech). Soderbergh delivers so much and promises even more.

The directors of both pictures know the risk these days in mining the movie tradition of sophisticated comedy-drama that stretches from Midnight to Manhattan and Broadcast News. Before sex, lies earned raves at the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and then won the top prize at Cannes, Soderbergh was apprehensive. "I thought the film would seem too European for an American audience," he says, "and too dialogue heavy to translate in Europe. I figured ten people would go see it four times, and that would be that." Reiner, a man Ephron describes as being "very fond of his depressions," dared to commit some small optimism on his happy set. As Meg Ryan recalls, "Rob said, 'Wouldn't it be amazing to have this kind of experience, make a great movie, and have people come to see it?' "

Now people have the chance to see two comedies that waft like zephyrs through a movie summer humid with macho derring-do. In their world, romance is bruised but blooming; and the characters are so fully drawn that the moviegoer can become possessive of them, even judgmental, as he would with a friend. Would Sally have faked a fortissimo orgasm in a crowded restaurant? Would footloose Graham come back to Baton Rouge to find a love he lost nine years before? Of course they are not real people, and the difference is crucial in this talk-as-sex era. Real people talk back, act up, walk out. So let's leave the trend where it belongs: onscreen, in the season's smartest, funniest real- love films.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles