Pornokitsch Classic Movies: Ladyhawke (1985)
Monday, June 14, 2010
I was five when this movie came out; I loved it so much that, the night my parents and I saw it in the cinema, I came home and turned my favorite Lego knight into Rutger Hauer's Navarre. I've long since lost my Lego knight, but I still love this movie. (And Rutger Hauer's Navarre.)
In theory, Ladyhawke should be a complete disaster. Its fantasy is the lowest of the low (an interesting contrast to all the epic high fantasy that studios were putting out in the mid-80s), its setting is the filthy and patently unsexy 12th century, its stars are a random hodgepodge of actors, and its score is the joint progeny of Andrew Powell and Alan Parsons.
And yet, somehow, Ladyhawke works. (If you can get past the synth-driven score, once derided as "the worst soundtrack ever composed.")
I hardly know where to begin. The cinematography is gorgeous, absolutely stunning. My mom still cites a cutaway scene showing the titular hawk gliding over a lake as one of her favorite moments in all of cinema. Because the plot hinges on the transition between day and night, the film is saturated with extraordinary color, the warmth of sunrise and the coolness of sunset each vividly rendered.
And then there's the cast. Matthew Broderick is not the world's most versatile actor, and his accent slips around like a kid on ice skates, but he brings a much needed charm and levity to an otherwise very serious story. He's backed by the exceptional Leo McKern, best known perhaps as Rumpole of the Bailey, as a drunken disaster of a monk searching for redemption. Rutger Hauer glowers and menaces as the story's hero, a knight cursed to turn into a wolf at nightfall, while his lady-love, the incandescent Michelle Pfeiffer, travels with him - as a hawk during the day and a human only by night. Rounding out the cast are the gorgeously sinister John Wood, enjoying the hell out of himself as an evil bishop, and a young Alfred Molina, so filthy and creepy-looking as to be nearly unrecognizable. Indeed, one of the movie's many pleasures is listening to the villains intone Pfeiffer's name, Isabeau, each twisting it around in his mouth to make it more ominous than the last.
And if you're a sucker for good old fashioned sword-fighting, Ladyhawke has it in spades. Also, gorgeous horses, over-the-top slow motion sequences, and even a decent love story between two characters one isn't naturally inclined to hate. And even the score has begun to resist its identification as universally terrible, in this age of 80s retro-cool. (That said, it's still pretty silly.)
It's easy to make fun of Ladyhawke, for all the reasons I've listed above. I suggest you don't show it to an audience inclined to cynicism, because it really is very easy to ridicule. But if you're willing to disconnect from your post-post-post modernism and your irony and your academic detachment you'll find, at the heart of the movie, a Pornokitsch Classic.