GOING WITH IT.(Full Frontal; The Last Kiss)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-AUG-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Now and then, big-time filmmakers undergo curious moments of confusion in which they imagine that what they are doing--concocting characters and emotions, then assembling the scenes in an artificial progression called a story--is somehow naughty or deceitful. They may think that the stories are merely manipulative, that the actors are phonies, that the writers, directors, and set designers are getting away with something. And, of course, they are. Yet no one wants them to get away with it more than the audience. It's not as if we don't know that we're being lied to. All we ask is that the lies yield some truth--dramatic, emotional, erotic, geographic, decorative--that interests us. "Full Frontal," which was put together by Steven Soderbergh in one of those strangely muddled moments, is perhaps the most naively awful movie I've seen from the hand of a major director. An attempted neo-Godardian deconstruction of cinematic reality, "Full Frontal," written by Coleman Hough, turns deconstruction into hash. Actors play actors who are making a movie within the movie, and half the time we can't tell whether we're in the inner or the outer movie or why we should care. "Full Frontal" is naive because no matter how many levels of representation a director puts into his work, the finished product still...

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