Rewind After Viewing

Ishtar, written and directed by Elaine May. RCA/Columbia Pictures (1987)

Is a feminist buddy picture about men possible? Yes – when the director's Elaine May, with her brand of gentle lunacy/common sense. In Ishtar, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty are lousy songwriter wannabes – unheroic, generous, unsuspicious, openhearted and more than a teensy bit slow (in short, sheltered white American men as May and I would like to see them). Isabelle Adjani, revolutionary heroine, is the real hero of the picture, so disguised during most of the movie that we see only the tip of her nose and her upper lip. (She flashes one breast for a millisecond in a crowded airport in a scene so utterly anti-erotic that it probably explains much of the critics' venom toward the picture.) At the end we get to see her whole face – briefly – in a very demure dress with a lace collar.

May doesn't set up her laughs and pile-drive them home. The picture's pacing is gentle and respectful, in a way I associate with women's pictures; i.e. things ripple and you get to smile at them. I found it all excruciatingly, deliciously funny, from Beatty's knitted cap with its pom-pom and his overstuffed quilted jacket with waddle to match (they make him look like a five-year-old in a snowsuit) to a wonderfully awful camel that personifies sheer animal self-will; it goes when you want it to stop, sits when you want it to go, wanders in circles no matter what you do, and groans horribly at all the wrong moments, like a distressed basso trombone. There's one impulsive kiss just as clumsily uncomfortable as such things really are, and the actors are obviously delighted to be playing real people and not Hollywood glitz.

Given the outline of the kind of film feminists cringe at, May has produced – by some major miracle – a woman's film. There's not a trace of the patriarchal adulation of male heroics; Adjani's smarts (and compassion) save the day, and there's a wonderful portrayal of a C.I.A. man so oily your fingertips cringe – you know if you touched him, they'd come away greasy. If Indiana Jones (and all the others) make you snarl, Ishtarss is the perfect antidote. The critics disliked it, and it bombed at the box office, but it's a gem.