Bodies, Rest & Motion

Michael Steinberg – 1993 – USA

Dismissed as affected and contrived in its day, Bodies, Rest and Motion is now almost forgotten since  it lacks big stars and never gathered much of a following.  It does share two actors with Pulp Fiction (1994), Eric Stoltz and Tim Roth, and it does feature two very beautiful actresses, Bridget Fonda and Phoebe Cates, but it never really caught on.  The early 90s were a small golden age for independent film in America, and this film is not in the same league as the best of that period by any means, but it is cut from the same cloth; quiet, character-driven and low-key.  Roth is a shiftless electronics salesman in Arizona who decides to steal a TV, ditch his girlfriend (Fonda) and skip town.  Fonda, meanwhile, strikes up a casual romance with a quirky, philosophical house-painter (Stoltz).  The situations and especially the dialogue are a little on the pretentious side, which is what primarily turned critics off, but after so many years, I found these things a bit quaint rather than offensive; its sincerity is certainly more admirable than the assembly-line clichés of more mainstream movies.