Running for Love

WHEN PERSONAL BEST first opened, its advertisements featured a sweaty and determined Mariel Hemingway crouching in racing position. Above the photograph, bold letters proclaimed something like. A movie about crossing boundaries exceeding limitations and giving everything you've got." A few weeks later a different ad appeared. This one showed Hemingway reaching across an empty space to a smiling Patrice Donnelly under the suggestive legend. "With a competitor...how close can you get?" Maybe the film's distributors though lesbianism would sell better than athletics. Form the second ad's rapid disappearance we can inter that it didn't.

Women in love may be line for the pages of Playboy and Interview (both of which feature lengthy profiles of Hemingway this month), but apparently the average redblooded American still squirms at the thought of "that kind of thing." Even the film's eminently sensitive director. Robert Towne, finally succumbs to provincial homophobia--it won't be giving away much to say that at the end of Personal Best. Hemingway "reforms" and takes for a lover a handsome blond male swim champion. Girl meets girl. Girl gets girl. Girl loses girl. Boy gets girl. Audience breathes big sigh of relief. And it's really too bad, because with a little more courage. Towne could have made what is now a very good and sometimes beautiful film, into a great one.

Personal Best traces a few years in the lives of Tory skinner and Chris Cahill (Donnelly and Hemingway), two track athletes who fall in love when they meet during a downswing in Chris's career. As the women fight and make love with a cool intensity rarely captured on film. Chris (the younger of the two) breaks out of her slump and comes into her own as a runner and hurdler. She even joins Tory's team, after the established track star pleads with her coach to give Chris a chance.

But for all its apparent domestic bliss (illustrated annoyingly with giddy romps on the beach to the strains of Billy Joel), the affair begins to take on an air of "Star is Born" fatality. Tory, at first the more stable of the two, has a drunken tantrum at a party when Chris dances with a man. Things get tenser as it becomes likely that the pair, now evenly matched, will have to compete against each other to go to the Olympics, a prospect they have feared since their first night, when they got stoned, watched TV, arm-wrestled steamily before hopping into bed. In a climatic scene that ultimately leads to separation, Chris accuse her mentor of deliberately putting her out of commission by moving a marker in a high jump practice, causing her to injure her leg.

THE REST of the film follows Chris's emotional ups and downs as she prepares for the Olympic meet, and it is here that Towne cups out in the name of truth, justice and the American way. Enter former Olympic medalist Kenny Moore, as a handsome jock who sets out to rescue Chris from her very own fate-worse-than-death. He's kind, generous, considerate--probably one of the nicest, handsome jocks she's ever met--and the two soon find themselves in love and in bed.

To show that Chris can have just as much fun with a man as she did with a woman. Towne (who also wrote and produced the film) has her express delight with her lover's penis, and beg to hold it while he urinates. Look folks. Towne seems to be saying, heterosexuals can be kinky too. After the emotional depth of the lesbian relationship, this sounds suspiciously apologetic--as apologetic as Chris when she reluctantly explains to her new man that Tory was more than a friend.

Yet Personal Best survives these moral shortcomings with the help of a talented group of actors and some remarkable camera work. Towne's script has some irritating holes--Do either Chris or Tory go to school? If not, why does Chris waste her time reading biology? If so, why don't they ever go to class--but he makes them seem unimportant by lovingly photographing his subjects' every muscle in a moist, lush color often enhanced by slow motion, and the eerie sound of rhythmic breathing. This may sound cliched by now, especially after the slow-motion races of Chariots of Fire, but Towne always adds an extra twist to keep things from getting boring. In one particularly stunning warm-up sequence, for instance, he follows the team through all five pentathlon events: A dozen shotputters twirl into one perfect throw, and the high jump becomes a graceful cascade of falling torsos. Sweat drips heavily to a moist track; muscled, streamlined bodies pound the turf; and the camera zooms artfully to catch that last look of desperate concentration.

Although Hemingway's whiny voice begins to grate after about 10 minutes, she plays Chris with the awkward natural charm of an ingenue. Donnelly, who ran for the 1976 Olympic team, shines as the insecure, driven Tory. And Scott Glenn does equally well as their hard-assed coach who drams of leading a male team with which he wouldn't have to worry about "Lynn Swann getting pregnant or Rocky Bleier forgetting his tampax." It's only unfortunate that Towne didn't leave just this kind of chauvinist mentality in his fictitous locker room, rather letting it lead to a wimpy ending for an otherwise fine movie.