Moist Lips and Saucer Eyes

MY GRANDFATHER USED to own a lucrative cosmetics business which he founded during the Depression. His lipstick line, the keystone of the operation, sold well even in the '30s. On the cover of the package was always a ripe, peachy-faced young woman, lips moist and slightly pursed, and a slogan that read: "Keep Kissable." No one then, 'least of all my grandfather, would have considered that message unduly provocative. "Keep Kissable" meant more or less what it said.

The pretty girl and the slogan did what they were meant to do--they sold makeup to women who were in the market themselves. The sexual revolution drastically changed the terms of the sales; sex became more blatant and the advertising industry naturally kept pace. Now that a kiss usually promises more than a kiss, we have advertisements for women's clothing that wink slyly, "What to wear on Sunday when you won't be home till Monday," and underwear ads that murmur, "You owe it to your audience." And we have a new movie about a top fashion model who sells lipstick so seductively that she is brutally raped by a young man who takes her lip-smacking photographs to heart.

Interesting that Lipstick, starring fashion mannequin Margaux Hemingway, has been released in the same month that Hemingway signed a million-dollar contract with Faberge to promote a new perfume called "Babe." In the movie, Hemingway plays herself--a rangy blonde beast with innocent eyes and a loose smile. In the "Babe" ads, she lies snuggled in a tuxedoed gentleman's arms as they float on a tire-raft on some cool body of water in the dusk. Both media peddle the same image--Babe, at once the child and the temptress, the pampered, beautiful, single woman who's rich enough to get her Halston all wet.

Such coziness between the cosmetics and film industries is a red flag. Lipstick is simply a bad commercial movie intended to sell Margaux Hemingway. Its excuse for existing is its very serious subject matter, which is packaged and disposed of rather neatly so as not to distract from Miss Hemingway's charms.

A DAY IN THE LIFE of Chris McCormack, fashion model: Chris's young sister (played by Margaux' real sister, Mariel) invites her music teacher Gordon Stuart home to meet Chris. Stuart (played by Chris Sarandon, Al Pacino's haunted, hysterical male wife in Dog Day Afternoon) composes modern music. He comes to Chris's apartment with a cassette of his screeching electronic creations under his arm, moog pieces which he plays for her with the tentative devotion of a supplicant offering a sacrifice to a goddess. She's bored, her attention wanders, she takes a phone call. Tantalized by her public image and enraged by her indifference, Stuart rapes her. His ego is composed of his music and his genitals--just as he is about to sodomize her he switches on the cassette to full volume.

The movie claims to protest such outright exploitation of women. Yet after this voyeuristic and sensationalized scene, there are others which exploit Chris McCormack's predicament in more subtle, teasing ways. The trial is fast and slick; the defense counsel makes his main point--that Stuart couldn't help being seduced by Chris's public eroticism--by asking the model how she manages to appear so provocative in her photographs. "Isn't it true that you think about things that will make you hot? Don't you have to imagine sexual acts to turn yourself on for these pictures?" he challenges. And she, like a fool, meekly murmurs, "Yes." The rapist is acquitted.

THE POINT of all this is presumably to show that, in addition to the illegal abuse that women suffer in the form of rape, they also suffer completely legal abuse in the courtroom--where rape victims are rarely presumed innocent. No argument there. Since this is by now a truism, director Lamont Johnson has the courage to make this one point unequivocally. The rest is pure, dumb contrivance: Stuart rapes Chris's little sister, Chris shoots him on the spot, and a contrite, now-sympathetic jury acquits her for her own crime of passion.

The more compelling social questions which the movie raises--why Chris fails to understand how anyone could take her half-nude, public come-on seriously ("I was just doing my job," she says simply, why Stuart at first makes an icon of her and never quite loses his attitude of reverence, even after the rape--hover tantalizingly over the early scenes but are dissipated in the rude glare of simple melodrama.

Hemingway seems understandably comfortable in the role of Chris. Too comfortable, at times; she simply walks through many of the scenes, saucereyed, plopping her lines into the laps of others. But her acting improves when she's in good company; she's fine in the rape scene, where Chris Sarandon gives a controlled performance of a moderately sick young man, without resorting to the crazed eyes and maniacal gestures of the stereotype. And her willful strength in the courtroom is the reflected glow of Anne Bancroft's fiery performance as her lawyer. Bancroft, looking rather haggard, uses her familiar tight-lipped, manipulative and superbly confident persona for the forces of good this time; here she's Mrs. Robinson in professional clothing, expressing her contempt for men with the zeal of a crusader who has finally found a worthy cause. The part is embarrassingly small for an actress with such enormous scope, but the intelligent and rancorous gleam in her eye suggests what she might have done with this movie given half a chance.

VIOLENCE, FEMINISM, SEX, lip gloss, revenge--it could have been interesting. Instead, for cheap thrills, Lipstick exploits the phenomenon it pretends to condemn, making rape into fatuous entertainment. We can't help wondering who is meant to be responsible for the crime. The anaesthetized Chris, who was only doing her job? Or Stuart, who was so inconsiderate as to act out a fantasy that all men who can see and read are encouraged to have? The cosmetics business which peddles the tools of seduction, the advertising industry which purveys the promise, or the women who demand the product? Where does the guilt lie? According to this film, nowhere. A commercial film has to please everybody.

Someone should make a movie some day about how so-called sexual liberation can backfire. As women have become more sexually "free," they have clearly become more freely sold--in advertisements, in movies like Lipstick, and in the sexual marketplace, where more is expected of them than ever.