Is there box office after death? Clearly, considering such specter spectacles as “Ghost” and “Defending Your Life.” Now, B_Switch_b and B_Truly, Madly, Deeply_b provide a fascinating look at how two cultures regard the afterlife. Nothing could be more English than the BBC-produced “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” the first feature of writer-director Anthony Minghella; nothing could be more American than “Switch,” the brainchild of veteran Blake Edwards. Minghella’s movie is culture with a capital culch: it has ghosts playing Bach, a plumber who quotes Dylan Thomas and the kind of cinematography that holds a close-up of a white sheet on a clothesline, possibly signifying the Whiteness of Life. Edwards gives us slapstick, sex, vulgarity and a general air of Hollywood wacko. Both are highly engaging films, yet it’s “Switch” that touches a deeper nerve.
The talented Minghella has created a fable about Nina (the entrancing Juliet Stevenson), a young Londoner whose lover Jamie has recently died. The distraught Nina broods unconsolably in her decrepit flat with its yucky brown water, buckling walls and toddling rats. Then one day Jamie (Alan Rickman) returns, bringing back Nina’s will to live. Jamie is no heavenly hologram; he plays a mean cello and restores the joy of sex to Nina. So, is he a projection of her mind and body? Reason says yes, but then who are all those friends he’s brought with him from the Great BBC Beyond, a motley crew who sprawl about watching videos of classic films? These ambiguous spooks are amusing. But more uplifting than funny is Nina’s encounter with Mark (Michael Maloney), a chap of excruciating virtue, who stops fistfights with magic tricks and gives art therapy to a group of retarded people. It’s Mark who weans Nina away from her obsession with the dearly undeparted Jamie. So life wins out over death, and sensitivity wins out over sentimentality. But it’s a close call.
In “Switch,” Blake Edwards couldn’t care less about sensitivity: he’s too smart for that. In his fable, hotshot adman and sexual conquistador Steve Brooks (Perry King) is murdered by three of his angry ex-conquests, led by Margo Brofman (JoBeth Williams). Huddled fearfully in purgatory, Brooks learns he’s not going straight to hell. “Thank God,” he says. “You’re welcome” is the reply, uttered by two voices, male and female. The two-gender deity sends Brooks back to earth, where his ticket to heaven depends on finding a female who likes him. To make it tougher, Brooks goes back as a woman, Amanda (Ellen Barkin). The fun is in watching the ultimate male-chauvinist ego trapped inside a woman’s body-the kind of bombshell bod that’s been his lifelong prey.
Edwards’s absorption with sexual ambiguity goes way back in his long career: in the 1967 “Gunn” a female killer turns out to be a male transvestite; in “Victor/Victoria” Julie Andrews plays a woman pretending to be a man impersonating a woman; in “Skin Deep” John Ritter is a womanizer sexually challenged by a female body-builder who’s got more testosterone than he has. “Switch” is at once the most farcical and most serious of Edwards’s gender-benders. Barkin is wonderfully funny as a he whose flesh is a her. Barkin is gloriously female, but her crumpled smile suggests a guy who lurks mischievously within. Amanda (good name) is alternately infuriated and turned on by her new body. Teetering perilously downstairs on high heels, she gives up and slides down the banister; catching sight of herself in a mirror, she reacts with the macho lust that still burns within.
“Switch” plays witty and wise games with every shade of sexuality. Trying to unscramble her chromosomes, Amanda can’t make it with Steve’s best friend, Walter (Jimmy Smits), or with the lesbian cosmetics queen Sheila (Lorraine Bracco). The movie’s solution to this cosmic problem isn’t perfect, but nobody since Preston Sturges could have come closer than Edwards. One of the nice things about “Switch” is that there’s something in it that will probably offend every faction in the splintered culture of gender, from straight to gay. Edwards’s final vision of sexual reconciliation is funny and liberating. Plato, who came up with a similar idea in his “Symposium,” would have loved it.
