The Second Coming of Suzanne

These quotes are from The Good, The Bad & The Very Ugly; A Hollywood Journey, by Sondra Locke (1997). "The script of his (Barry's) upcoming film had been inspired by Leonard Cohen's haunting song "Suzanne" and was the story of three men- an artist and a director and a newsman- who all love Suzanne and are all changed in some way by her innate goodness and purity. The screenplay was quirky and dreamlike..." (123).

Locke was brave to take part in this abstract vision, and to risk possible injury in the shots captured from a helicopter. She shared her beautiful physical form with the world in two shots with Paul Sand, and these are very special now considering what Locke weathered later on in her personal life.

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One of those post-psychedelic burnout non-movies which emerged from the avant-garde independent cinema fringe in the early 70s. The hazy, Gordian narrative concerns three men obsessing over a dove-like and rather pasty-looking Sondra Locke, who has been cast as a female Christ figure for an indie film production. Chockablock with specious arty imagery and pseudo-spirituality, the most troubling thing about this movie is its smug air of self-importance. Truth is, this film is an oblique, audience-divorcing pipe-dream which struts embarrassingly through its duration with impudently splayed tailfeathers. Credit due, it does exhibit some bold editing technique and camerawork, and sets itself afloat with a lovely folk ballad by Leonard Cohen.

Honestly, I have never seen such a wide load of unharnessed grandiosity in all my life. I think it's safe to assume that median viewers will find themselves picking little fuzzballs off their sweaters withing fifteen minutes.

3/10

This movie is hardly ever brought up, but when it is I feel the need to fervently defend it. But that is not an easy thing to do when faced with the reality of quality of the film. I have no problems with slow films, in fact I love films that are delibrately difficult and slow paced, I consider it athlectic movie-going to watch things like Syberberg's "Hitler", or things like "Out 1" "Berlin Alexanderplatz", or movies of conventional length but maddingly slow like "The Disappearance" or the films of Bresson or Terrance Malick. This film is slow, and I can't take any points off for that, but at times it does feel like there is no purpose to the pacing. The most used word to describe the film is pretentious. There is not doubt the film "flirts" with pretension, but I feel there is validity to the idea, the plot and the story, but I can understand why people might be turned off by it. It is frivolous in its poetics, and if you are a person concerned with the immediate or the political, you'll probably hate this movie, but if you like loose or experimental narrative and ambiguity of motive this film will appeal to you. Two things the film has going for it is one; the acting. It's uniformly strong, and Richard Dreyfuss is in it more than most people will tell you, but he isn't the start as the box art would lead you to believe. And two; the use of music. Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" is use to great effect in the film, and in a way that is the truest visual representation of the meaning of that song. But above all the greatest thing about the film is the concept it plays with. A man obsessed about making a film about the second coming of Jesus, but as a woman. it is fascinating to watch this unfold, but I do have to adimit the pay off is disappointing. In the hands of someone like Nicholas Roeg, Bunuel, Bresson, or Malick this might have been one of the greatest films of all time. As it is now it's an interesting film, and an infuriating viewing because your left wondering what could have been.

I bought this movie off of EBAY, thinking since Sondra Locke and Richard Dreyfuss were in it, it should be good. They were both in it for like 35 seconds. This movie was way too bazaar and weird to follow. I bought it in July, started watching, got bored, and didn't finish it till October. The movie is really boring, and eerie cause EVERYONE in the whole film is obsessed with Sondra looking like a hippie. **** out of 10 stars.

Mindless dribble about the second coming of Christ in the form of a hippie and albino looking Sandra Locke. You have no idea what's happening on the screen with the irritating theme song "Suzanne" being played over and over throughout the movie until when "The Second Coming of Suzanne" is over you already know it by hard no matter how hard you try to forget the whole thing.

This off-the-wall armature movie maker Logan,Jared Martin, is out to make the movie of the century but is so rude and obnoxious that none in the banking world is willing to finance his project. Planning to go on his own Logan then spots this couple at a seaside café and is fascinated with the young woman Suzanne, Sandra Locke, who reminds him of someone he knew in another life: Jesus Christ.

With Logan's assistant and all around gofer Clavius, Richard Dreyfuss,somehow getting a $740,000.00 loan from the bank to finance Logan's masterpiece he starts to work on Suzanne by flattering her about her talent as an actress in order to get her interested to be in his film. This leads to Suzanne not only leaving her boyfriend artist Simon, Paul Sand, but later Simon being so depressed and feeling all alone takes a gun to his mouth and blows his brains out.

The movie also has two somewhat unrelated sub-plots in it that has to do with a young autistic girl Dorothy, Kari Avalos, who's cured of her autism by Suzanne after everyone else, at the psychiatric hospital that she was committed to,failed. It's not really known what exactly Suzanne was doing at the hospital but she seemed to be some kind of orderly or volunteer there; was this supposed to show us in the audience that she, like Jesus, could miraculously heal the sick?

There's also this newspaper columnist and big time businessman tycoon Jackson Sinclair, Gene Barry, who seems to be either going through a very difficult mid-life crisis or has seen a biblical-like vision that changed his life forever. Sinclair had been searching for the meaning of life as well as what it's all about all through the movie and wanted to know why there's all this suffering in the world, like this movie that he's in, and seemed to have found the answer when he first laid his eyes on Suzanne. Sinclair also got some sense knocked into his head when his private chauffeur David, Mark Rasmusser, who's gotten sick and tired of his weird and crazy hallucinations almost running him off a cliff in a kamikaze like drive along the Pacific Coast.

The movie "The Second Coming of Suzanne" goes on with a number of unrelated sequences, probably to fill or pad in some time by it's director and film editor, and then goes to it's final scene in a Christ-like crucification on a hill as Logan has all the cameras rolling. It turns out that the crazed Logan got so carried away with his masterpiece as he tried to replicate, on the helpless and tied up Suzanne, the actual crucification of Jesus Christ some 2,000 years ago.

Hard to sit through and almost impossible to follow "The Second Coming of Suzanne" puts you through the same kind torture that Suzanne is put through by Logan and the makers of the film. The movie tries to be arty but that's just an excuse to cover up it's brainless and non-existent storyline and even worse the terrible and amateurish acting by everyone in it.