A Safe Place (1971) Fiercely independent and defiantly artistic, actor-writer-director Henry Jaglom wandered through the Hollywood community of the new cinema rebels like Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson.
Long before indie film was ever given the attention it enjoys today, Jaglom went about crafting his small iconoclastic films that fell way below the radar of mainstream audiences and critics. Much like Robert Altman, Jaglom preferred to discover the meaning of his films while making them.....right along side his actors.
'A Safe Place' his first feature length writer-director effort, may very well be the epitome of his art.....a collection of jumbled, random moments in the life of Susan, a restless, capricious young woman, perfectly brought to life by Tuesday Weld.
Weld worked her up though the Hollywood trenches, by playing playful manic pixie dream girls who leaned a little toward trailer trash with a touch of psychosis. Like Jaglom she was another unsettled spirit, seeking high art and avoiding crowd pleasing projects that might have made her a major star.
Jaglom and Weld, therefore, were made for each other.......with the director shattering Susan's life into bits and pieces of her past and present.....in no particular order we see.....Susan alternately entrancing and toying with two different would-be boyfriends, the straight-arrow nerdy Fred (Phil Proctor) and mellow, ultra-cool Mitch (Jack Nicholson)......mixed in with dryly ironic semi-romantic episodes are Susan's fantasies (dreams? Past life recollections?) involving a mysterious magician (Orson Welles) who can levitate balls and squint his eyes to make people in Susan's life disappear.......
Huh?
Does any of it mean anything? Is Susan's quest for the comfort and peace of a 'safe place' merely the same just-out-of-reach illusion we're all looking for, but resigned to never find?
You tell us. We doubt you'd ever get a straight answer from Henry Jaglom, because the point of the film might be to make you figure it out and arrive at your own answers.
Here's the reason we watched such an uncompromisingly non-linear film like.....for the simple reason that just like Fred and Mitch, we're forever enamored of Tuesday Weld, the manic pixie that nobody ever really gets to possess.
Similar to our enormous ongoing crush on Anya Taylor-Joy, we would've watched Tuesday, at the height of her career, read the phone book......(and 'A Safe Place' a tossed salad of images and ideas, comes pretty close to a phone book)
Primarily for two separate demographics.......lovers of daring, experimental cinema and lovers, like BQ of the luminous but ever elusive Tuesday Weld. For those groups, 2 & 1/2 stars (**). Anyone outside of those categories.......better off to pass it by.......
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