A Working Man's Fellini

IF FELLINI NEEDED anything to make him hang up his clipboard and maul out his casting book it is Neil Israel's Bachelor Party, a working man's 8 1/2 that within the framework of an allegorical pre-wedding debauchery provides a scary but ultimately redemptive examination of the bases of modern society.

The aura of Mannian decadence that pervades the luxurious hotel suite--a reference to the hotel scenes in Death in Venice?--is brought forth with such powerful and unsparing force precisely because Israel peoples his film with everyman figures--the sex-starved ticket agent, the sex-starved auto mechanic the sex-starved doctor and his equally emaciated wife--and sets the action in America's backyard.

Israel, in conjunction with executive producer Joe Roth, associate producer Gautam Das, producers Ron Moler and Bob Israel, and presented by Raju Shared Patel in an Aspect Ratio/Twin Continental Production, fills Bachelor Party with a potpourri of literary and classical allusions. Rick (Tom Hanks) is a soon-to-be-wedded bus driver who invokes the love-death imagery of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, the death-as voyage image of classical Greek mythoiogy, and the transportation theme of his own Police Academy. All at the same time.

Rick's soon-to-be wife, played with a Bergmanesque subtlety by the imperious Tawny Kitean is an innocent, whom Israel gives an other-worldly quality by providing only sketchy biographical details. Her blush is that of the angels when a co-worker tells her in a mocking voice, salted with the weight of wisdom. "It seems like only yesterday I taught you how to give a blow-job."

The blow-job as a metaphoric image of mankind's embrace of the nuclear warhead, the psycho-sexual elements of penis-envy described by peace activist Helen Caldicott, is matched by Rick and his friends' contradictory vision of the female. Rick cheers when the auto-mechanic raises a toast to "women with big tits" but through deep self-examination is led to reject the ephemeral and ultimately self-destructive zeitgeist of his own sex drive (read: the arms race).

But before the audience can settle in to the deceivingly simple morality play. Israel yanks out our chain, as it were. Why marriage? What is marriage but a rationalization of humanity's baser instincts? This is a realization that obviously bothers Israel, and that is why his bachelor party is fueled by an almost manic fear of the next day's ceremonies. The Renoiresque debauch operates almost as a tragic catharsis, an the participants will the demonic spirits that torment them to take flight and be gone.

Israel's construct is simple. He manipulates his characters and the plot to set up the pure existential, choice, a Sartrean quandry-cum-Kafkaesque absurdity. Does Rick shtup Tracy, the modern-day Aphrodite, at the party, and lose his marriage, or does he stick to his goes for a set of out-dated moral strictures that Israel effectively shows are no longer relevant?

The question is never truly answered, and, in with all great cinema, makes Bachelor Party strangely disquieting, for it raises more questions than it can answer. Does the final marriage scene imply that mankind is saying "I do" to his own self-destruction? Is the consummation of marriage really only an invitation an voyage to the magic mountain of moral turpitude? Or is it just having your chain yanked by the almighty?