Deja Vu . Tucson Weekly . 08-03-98

Deja Vu

DIRECTED BY: Henry Jaglom

REVIEWED: 08-03-98

Director Henry Jaglom skates down the border between profundity and hokum in this exploration of true love versus compromise. Stephen Dillane and Victoria Foyt (Jaglom's watery-eyed, appealingly emotive wife, who co-wrote the screenplay with him) star as a Brit and a Los Angelean who seem to be natural soulmates, cosmically fated to be together, and all that jazz. Too bad they're already entrenched in long-term relationships. Though Jaglom's loose, cinema-verité style is very much in evidence, he tries hard to make every step of the romance follow a logical, understandable progression, which gets to be a problem--he keeps using a nail gun on the kinds of details where a thumbtack would suffice. (At a key point, Dillane and Foyt actually exclaim to each other, "You're married!," "You have a fiancée!," "You're married!," "You have a fiancee!," revealing an embarrassingly wide rift between cinema-verité and realism.) Then there's the mystical "surprise" ending, which plays like an episode of The Twilight Zone, as directed by Fabio. Jaglom may be an old friend of Orson Welles (in fact, Déjà Vu appears to be based on a memorable line of dialogue from Citizen Kane), but an auteur he's not. On the plus side, it's refreshing how the two jilted characters are rendered so sympathetically (unlike in Sleepless in Seattle and similar films), and the charmingly well-aged Vanessa Redgrave livens up her every scene as a veteran free spirit.

--Woodruff

Capsule Reviews
Deja Vu
Deja Vu
Deja Vu
Deja Vu

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