You Are What You Eat

"YOU Are What You Eat" is what Hollywood press agents like to call a "romp" movie. In this kind of film a lot of people get together and romp all over the place for about 75 minutes. The Beatles did this in Hard Day's Night; Annette Funicello and cohorts had their fun in Beach Party; and now Tiny Tim, the hippies and some plain old hipsters (e.g., Malcolm Boyd) get their chance to whoop it up in You Are What You Eat.

But for all their whooping and romping, the crowd in the latter movie fails to provide as much fun for the audience as have the revelers of the earlier films of this genre.

In Hard Day's Night Richard Lester usually succeeded in sucking us into the Beatles' lives, so we could laugh with them at the absurdities of the strange world they inhabited. The romping in Beach Party was so alien to anything approaching our own teen-age lives that we could sit back and laugh at the ludicrousness of it all. Director-cameraman Barry Feinstein of What You Eat tries the Lester approach--he wants to make us a part of the romp--and fails.

Feinstein's movie has everything a movie about his subject should have, I guess: social protest, flower children, music (The Electric Flag, Peter Yarrow, Paul Butterfield, Tiny Tim) and the accompanying dances, psychedelic sequences, meditation, grass, sex. He has filmed the whole thing with the wild abandon we presumably associate with hippiedom: the camera bounces up and down, zooms in and out, swings all over the place. Similarly, the picture has been flamboyantly edited; no sequence stays on the screen very long, and Feinstein often cuts back to bits he has established earlier. Still, for all its airs of freedom, the movie doesn't work.

PART of the problem lies in the treatment of the subject. Lester didn't set out to depict the Beatles' world as it really is, but largely created a wacky life-style for them that would be novel for the audience. Feinstein, on the other hand, simply shows us hip youth as it is. This could be fun if we weren't already familiar with this terrain. But we've seen or even lived what he shows ourselves; nothing in You Are What You Eat is new or exciting. Since the film has no characters, there is no personal story we can wrap ourselves in. Nor, of course, is the movie's subject artificial, so as to merit derisive laughter. The film is just an unnarrated documentary with a few moments of performed entertainment stuck in.

And it isn't a particularly interesting documentary at that. The performers aren't on enough to counteract the boredom of the over-familiar romping. The psychedelic segments look primitive after Space Odyssey. The music (by John Simon) doesn't measure up to the best rock.

Adults who have avoided Life or television for three years might learn something from You Are What You Eat and may even be titillated by it. But as long as we can sit at home and have pot, music and sex, who needs it?