01 Page 8 --The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, November 14,1989 Too much baggage Shirley Valentine takes a trip to superficiality BY BRENT EDWARDS It can be difficult to transfer a story from theater to cinema because plays typically have a small number of sets and are more dialogue-oriented than their visual counterpart. In order to keep the film from seeming vi- sually static and "stagey," the action in the movie is usually moved to a number of different settings, since one of the advantages of film is its mobility in time and place. In Shirley Valentine, one other change is made in the adaptation, and that is the addition of characters - the stage version was a one-woman show. The movie recreates this solo characteristic by con- tinuing to have Shirley speak to the audience. It is a lit- tle disarming at first to have Shirley look directly at the camera and start talking, but this quickly lets us get close to her wonderful personality. Pauline Collins, who was so charming as Sarah in Upstairs, Down- stairs, is equally as endearing here as she recreates her Tony-winning performance. Shirley is a housewife who, at the age of 42, realizes that her life isn't any- thing like what she had always wanted it to be: her mar- riage, her ambition, and in fact the Shirley she once was died years ago. Now the most excitement she gets out of life is violating her husband's Steak On Thursday rule and serving it to him 15 minutes after his usual time. This is a shame because Shirley is an absolute charm. In the first half of the movie, she tells us about her life; we see that she is a very caring, energetic, and witty person. In describing her snobbish neighbor, she says, "...if you've been to Paradise, Gillian's got a sea- son ticket... If you've got a headache, Gillian's got a brain tumor." With this near-constant narrative we be- come Shirley's friend and confidante, learning how she desires an escape from her uncaring family and bleak life. Collin's portrayal of the uneducated but bitingly perceptive Shirley is full of warmth, which makes her occasional admittance of despair all the more painful. When Shirley travels to Greece with a friend, things start looking up for Shirley and looking down for the audience - the film begins to drag. Shirley's entertain- ing narrative becomes scarce as cardboard characters take a more important part in the picture. Their unrealistic portrayals may have been acceptable when recounted by Shirley onstage, but their realizations on screen are not very amusing, including the ultimate Greek stereotype played by Tom Conti. It would have been far more in- teresting to have Shirley just tell us what happened us- ing her unique viewpoint than to actually watch it hap- pen. The attempt to expand the story for the film medium backfires: the inclusion of the other characters make the film less, not more, entertaining. Shirley Valentine is still a smart and funny film, with a mes- sage that director Lewis Gilbert said before in his bril- liant Educating Rita: if you get stuck in a track of life you don't like, you car .hange it if you let yourself. It's just too bad Shirley didn't tell more of it herself. SHIRLEY VALENTINE is showing at Briarwood. ., , ,.. y. i Pauline Collins, who reprises her stage role in Shirley Valentine, is burdene are supposed flesh out the stage version's one-woman show. HEA VY Continued from page 7 roughs mutters about four words which amount to "no one loves me, and t don't care" and Zod Tamerlaine says in that pretentious way she cul- tivates, "I've never gone out on a date - I don't know what one is." The biggest problem of Heavy Petting, though, is that Benz does not try to interpret the stories and films in relation to how our attitudes have evolved since. By letting the interviews and films just sit there, Benz leaves them lifeless, and the montages of those corny films look like Buddy Holly music videos. The final problem is that the people cho- sen are from completely different age groups, and so their experiences don't mesh - John Oates does not have much to say in relation to why Allan Ginsberg is who he is. The most interesting thing about the film, even with all of these drawbacks, is that we see, once again, how the repressed and hypo- critical postwar America inspired the mass correction of sexual mores in "i ad with cardboard characters that the late '60s. There are some won" derful quotes as "moral decay caused' 16 of the 19 major civilizations to, vanish," and "the moral weaknesso leaves us open to the communist6 masters of deceit." It may leave us= happy that will live in a kindler andA gentler nation, but it doesn't add, much to the retrospective criticism that we've seen a lot of recently. So maybe for some people, those... who saw these propaganda