1969, USA/Canada
Based on the novel by actor/writer Peter Miles (under the pseudonym Richard Miles) and the first film of Altman’s ‘feminine quartet’ (the others being Images, 3 Women and Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), That Cold Day in the Park is a dreary, desperate film about the lengths to which a person will go to alleviate their emotional solitude.
Stage and screen dynamo Sandy Dennis stars as Frances Austen, a lonely woman who lives in a luxurious apartment overlooking Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
One day during a downpour she notices a teenage boy (Michael Burns of The Mad Room, reviewed elsewhere in this appendix) sitting on a park bench; when he is still there several hours later, she invites him up to get warm and dry.
He doesn’t speak a word, doesn’t nod or gesture or give her any indication of mental apprehension other than an occasional smile.
He takes everything she gives, and she fills the emptiness left by his silence with words, stories, food, gifts and deluded hope.
As the days pass and an unspoken contract is developed in which she is the caregiver and he the kept man, the companionship stimulates her long-repressed sexual impulses – but she dreads his inevitable boredom, and takes to locking him in his room at night.
It’s not until he sneaks out the window one night that we know for certain he can speak.
He lives partially at home with his family, and partly at the crash-pad of his sister and her draft-dodging drug-dealing boyfriend, where he brags about how much better life is at this strange lady’s house – even though she never stops talking and seems “a little mixed up”.
With no better option, he returns to Frances’s company.
Frances’s society obligations – tea time and lawn bowling – suddenly seem incredibly spinsterish and tedious, and whenever errands take her out of the apartment, she’s anxious to get back to her enigmatic prisoner.
One of her bowling companions confesses his affection for her – intercut with scenes of her in a gynaecological examination earlier that day, emphasizing her discomfort with the subject – and she halts the conversation, partially because the man represents everything ‘old” that she’s afraid of, but also because she’s got her heart set on the 19-year-old in the other room, a boy who could be both lover and son to her (an incestuous confusion mirrored by that of his sister, who repeatedly tries to seduce him).
With the same kind of sexual and class manipulation that we see in films like Umberto Lenzi’s Paranoia (also 1969), this story has a simple trajectory; basically the whole thing is about waiting to see who will break first.
Although terrifically unsettling, Dennis’s characterization does nothing to assuage negative stereotypes about middle-aged single women (that they get mean and possibly psychotic without a man), but this is only one of the many headcase roles she would excel at throughout her career.
hexafu 