MOVIE REVIEW : LOVE REIGNS OVER ‘TROUBLE IN MIND’

Welcome to RainCity, Alan Rudolph’s Casablanca, where the bad are bad, the good are good, where love is never easy and “If a man looked at a woman’s mouth before her eyes, he’d get fooled a lot less.”

Outrageous, audacious and endearing by turns, “Trouble in Mind” is a full-blown romance, with lovers-in-innocence and lovers-in-experience and a mysterious city, which draws them all and blurs the lines between them. That would be RainCity, located in the sort of future and in the past of a hundred films noirs.

(“Trouble” is at the Westwood Plaza only through Wednesday on an Academy Award-qualifying run.)

Wanda’s is the center of it all. It’s a cafe that Peter Gunn would feel right at home in, with a full complement of eccentrics presided over by a cropped-haired Genevieve Bujold as Wanda, savvy about the world and about who belongs with whom.

Homing back to Wanda’s and the lady herself after 2,842 days in the slammer for killing a man (“evil itself”) is Hawk (Kris Kristofferson)--ex-cop, righteous loner, serious romantic. She gives him a crummy set of rooms over the restaurant, and the film’s dazzling cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita fills them with an amber afternoon light that takes the loneliness right out of them. There, Hawk can build his intricate city models to his heart’s content, a world he can control while he tries to puzzle out in just what direction the other world has moved while he was away from it.

Down in Wanda’s alley is a tinny trailer that houses the film’s radiant young innocent, Georgia (Lori Singer); her baby, Spike, and the baby’s daddy, the dippy Coop (Keith Carradine), who’s a little light in the moral values department.

RainCity may look like Seattle to you. To writer-director Rudolph it’s the faintly ominous, semi-seedy City, sliced up into Sectors and presided over by the ominipresent militia. Not since George O’Brien went plumb to hell in “Sunrise” has a city turned a good man bad faster than RainCity turns Carradine. But since this is Alan Rudolph, not F. W. Murnau, watching Carradine turn, by degrees, from a sly country boy into a punked-out, living picture of Dorian Gray is achingly funny.

Georgia becomes a lure for both men, with the rueful Wanda kibbitzing gently, and Coop, in the company of Solo, poet and hot-watch peddler (the memorable Joe Morton of “Brother From Another Planet”), turns into one of the world’s more inept hoods.

As Rudolph glides from good world to evil one; as Hawk, his reluctant knight, must go into the fray one last time, the director’s control is lovely. The film drips with a pulp romance feeling: with the bittersweet rasp of Marianne Faithfull’s songs, Mark Isham’s shimmering score and the glory of Kurita’s muted colors. But there is a tart, cheerful undertone of ironic--and sometimes outrageous--humor to keep us from sugaring out.

Part of it is quick character vignettes: John Considine as the gangster-husband of a child bride, and absolutely the worst man to hold up in his own house, and Divine (in his first male role) as the movie’s Sidney Greenstreet, an impatient art collector and suave criminal.

Part of it is visual wit, Steven Legler’s pungent production design and the tribal and fantasy makeup designs of Edward Ternes, which keep the period a little off-balance and unidentifiable.

And part is terribly funny staging: an epic shoot-out at Hilly Blues (a.k.a. the Seattle Art Museum); a slapstick skirmish at Wanda’s with Buster Keaton timing.

One of “Trouble’s” nicest gifts is a pair of lovers to sigh over, whose future you agonize about, lovers who can make each other roar with laughter while lovingly intertwined. How long since we cared anything about a couple on the screen?

Like “Choose Me,” everyone may end up with a favorite moment: Kristofferson, drawling quietly, “Just turn around and I’ll be there”; the enchanting klutzy sweetness of Singer; Carradine, degenerating before our eyes; Morton’s lines of jungle poetry. Or you may just wish to hear Genevieve Bujold say, one last time to a furious Coop, that Georgia is “Shopping maybe. Movie? Life goes on.” Of such small joys are movie memories made.

‘TROUBLE IN MIND’

An Alive Films release of an Island Alive, Terry Glinwood presentation in association with Embassy Home Entertainment. Producers: Carolyn Pfeiffer, David Blocker. Writer/director: Alan Rudolph. Camera: Toyomichi Kurita. Editors: Tom Walls, Sally Coryn Allen. Production designer: Steven Legler. Music: Mark Isham. Songs performed by Marianne Faithfull. Costumes: Tracy Tynan. Makeup design: Edward Ternes. Executive producer: Cary Brokaw. Set decorator: K. C. Fox. Set designer: Don Fergison. With Kris Kristofferson, Keith Carradine, Lori Singer, Genevieve Bujold, Joe Morton, Divine, George Kirby, John Considine, Dirk Blocker, Robert Gould, Gailard Sartin, Caitlin Ferguson.

Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (persons under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian).