Lolita is a film buff and prostitute on Hollywood Boulevard. Having succeeded in getting a photo of celebrity actor Peter Blaine, she ends up with a client with an "angel face", who is supposed to be keeping look-out. When the crook, whose name is, in fact, Angel, messes up his job and the police arrive, he has to run away – from those of his buddies who weren't caught.

The following day, when he decides to leave for Mexico with his new girlfriend Julie, she starts having second thoughts when she discovers a weapon in the stolen car...

A little while later, and Julie has found a job as a waitress. She serves a table of arrogant, chauvinistic and superficial yuppies and is accidentally hit by one of them, Richard; so she tips the spaghetti into his lap. On the toilet she saves him from choking to death on a piece of chewing-gum. After a short, and more pleasant, conversation, things suddenly get really nasty, and Richard rapes her.

He is having an affair with Kathy, the wife of his boss Bobby, not knowing that the couple are using him to see how well their relationship bears up.

Bobby, meanwhile, attracts the attention of Patrick in a fitness studio. Patrick has no luck either flirting, or in his 6-month-old relationship with his lover, Peter, the aforementioned actor. Peter is one of those who does not want to be seen in public with another man. After an argument, Patrick makes off with the trophy Peter has just won for his acting and stakes it on a game of pool with some dubious contemporaries. Peter gets hold of these people and puts all his energies into saving his relationship...

In the final episode, Peter awakes, distraught, in the arms of Lolita, the prostitute, who is ready to provide extra early-morning services in addition to those already paid for, not knowing that this is her greatest idol...

• What can be related in yet another film version of Arthur Schntzler's famous Reigen that we haven't already met? A lesbian episode, for example. In fact, in the last 2½ years we have almost lost count of the number of independent Reigen-style productions to have been dumped on the market (coming soon: our now-due Trend Article), and once more the most obvious addition has been left out. Quite simply a plausible explanation escapes us, a film magazine always keen to analyse. In cinema, lesbians are now in, and for the last year there have been more jokes about, and caricatures of, lesbians than gays. This may have something to do with the long production phase of a German debut director trying to get a foot in the door of Hollywood. The studios in LA do follow the developments in indie cinema, and in the screenplays they are sent, but need a good five or six years. Once they take up an idea, however, they flog it to death. An independent production of a nameless director, however, needs a couple of years just to get to the cinema. Indeed, casting for Quiet Days in Hollywood took place so long ago, that at the time actors in the conservative USA were did not even want to play the gay roles – which now seems to be a must in every filmography.

What is new in Quiet Days in Hollywood is in the turning away from the sexual act as such on one hand and, on the other, the concentration on the interpersonal deficiencies of the 90s: people do a lot of experimenting, but this does not make them happy. On the contrary, they are dishonest with each other and use each other until all their dreams are cruelly shattered. Nobody can be trusted: one moment, partners and peers are nice, the next they lie, steal, rape or fight. Queer View readers who have had their willingness to trust damaged can wallow in their own outlook on the world dominated by disaster and disappointment.

Josef Rusnak, the German director and screenplay writer who originally hails from Tadjikistan, is much more interested in the characters, than a sexual trip (which has now rather lost its appeal). So the translation of heterosexuality into the gay world does not necessarily have to lead to an anything-goes bisexuality. Rusnak's narrative is perfectly believable. The episodes may not be spectacular, but will make members of the audience cast a critical eye on their partners and wonder if there are no unflattering parallels to the film world there.

Let us turn to the representations of two groups, women and homos. The female characters in this film are divided, in the battle of the sexes, into two diametrically opposed groups: rich winners and poor losers. Kathy pulls the strings in the eternal triangle of herself, her husband and his employee. Even the brief appearance of a successful woman in Julie's restaurant shows that, while the men may boast about their professional and sexual prowess, a short visit to her table is enough to show that in many areas, and without any real effort, women can be superior to the yuppies. Such well-off women can afford the sick theory that women's emancipation is a deliberate reversal of 200 000 years of evolution.

For Julie, however, getting the waitress job was a step up the social ladder. When she is raped at work by one of her guests, he suffers no consequences as a result. She, on the other hand, is cautioned. Quentin Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs demanded that the job of a waitress is to be respected. Any woman can get such a job, which can become a curse. The other profession with these characteristics is prostitution, which Lolita practises with a friend. In this field, violence is ever-present.

We always point out indefensible representations of rape wherever they occur, and this time it is the turn of the (German) press notes. In the restaurant washrooms, the boiling emotions of professionally humiliated Richard turn to "desperate lust", until be becomes "almost violent". Well now, my dear ladies and gentlemen, when a woman tries several times, and clearly, to ward off an attack both verbally and physically, and is still forced to have sex, this is not "almost" violent, but violent in the extreme. According to the notes, Julie feels both hurt and deeply moved by his emotional outburst, and is even more shocked when, "a few minutes later" Richard and his friends treat her as if she didn't exist. First of all, the "few minutes" in the film are actually an indefinite period of some days or weeks, one of the many inaccuracies in the press notes. But here is the point: the writer of the notes was obviously male centered, or even sympathised with the perpetrator. A woman is raped at work and is supposed to be deeply moved by this drastic display of "emotion"? Sympathise with the rapist? Where did the author of those lines get them from? Certainly not from the final cut of the film, where Julie ends up devastated on the floor of the gents' toilets. The author of the notes also misinterpreted the reunion scene. From the text, you might think that Julie thought she had a relationship with her rapist in mind. Instead, the intention is to show how indifferently he treats his victim, and how the raped woman gets into trouble with the management of the restaurant, and that Julie can count herself lucky she was not fired. A very true-to-life, dark episode, completely absent from the press notes.

Gays in the sports studio, seduction with a fallen bar of soap in the shower and a secret homo star, who does not want to show his lover in public – all this will make spoilt city gays gasp. The gays in the film are the only couple allowed to get back together again, which does not mean that they end up happily ever after.

All in all, Quiet Days in Hollywood delivers a film with a very familiar structure, but which, in contrast to many other films of this genre, manages to exhibit interesting contents.

ki, Berlin
picture ©: Warner Bros.
translation: andrew

Prostitution in Hollywood, Part I: Johns
Prostitution in Hollywood, Part III: Star Maps
Prostitution in Hollywood, Part IV: Skin & Bone
Prostitution in Hollywood, Part V: Hustler White

Sexual Chain Reactions, Part II: Eclipse
Sexual Chain Reaction, Part III: The Chain Reaction

Deutsche Version

copyright: Queer View, 12. Juni 1997