Sex, Death, Enlightenment

The Guitar
Running time 95 minutes
Written by Amos Poe
Directed by Amy Redford
Starring Saffron Burrows

Amy Redford’s The Guitar, from a screenplay by Amos Poe, reportedly inspired by a true story, begins on just about the lowest note imaginable, and then eventually soars to the highest note imaginable on the wings of a magical guitar and its ecstatic musical frenzies. And what more do you want in the way of entertainment during these ever ominous times?

Saffron Burrows, as the initially ill-fated Melody “Me” Wilder, is practically the whole show in this strange and often rapturous vehicle of charismatic redemption. Aside from her magical guitar, Melody is endowed with an amazing resilience from adversity that enables her to cope with many of the absurdities of her existence. When we first see her, she has been thrust into the maelstrom of extraordinarily congested urban crowds through which she trudges as if she were in perfect harmony with her moody monologues. Her first stop is a doctor’s office, where she learns from a woman physician that she has an inoperable tumor lodged in the vicinity of her vocal chords that will make it impossible for her to talk in the short time, perhaps a month, in which she has to live. The physician advises her to go home and settle her affairs before the end comes.

Next, she goes to her office, and is informed that she is being laid off immediately with a month’s severance pay from a job about which, we gather, she was not all that enchanted. To top things off in decidedly Jobian fashion, her boyfriend chooses this time to tell her that he needs time alone to find his “inner child.” This string of setbacks seems almost comical, but Melody is not laughing, and neither are we. But what more can possibly happen next?

Here the film takes an unexpected turn as Melody temporarily finagles an empty luxury apartment with her life’s savings in a new luxury high-rise building overlooking the river, Hudson or East, I don’t know. She then sets out to max all her credit cards by ordering the most voluptuous furnishings, clothes and fabrics she can find. She also orders the most expensive meals from expensive restaurants that deliver. We deduce from a near slip she makes while ordering that up to now she has been a dedicated vegetarian, but now decides to throw diets and caution to the wind with steaks and pizzas galore.

All the heavy furniture is delivered by the same African-American deliveryman with a conspicuous wedding band on his finger—which does not deter him from making polite advances to this clearly eccentric tenant. The resulting sex is more sensuous than sensual, as simply an extension of Melody’s too long suppressed hedonistic impulses.

Then the very young restaurant deliverygirl who brings Melody her meals expresses her desire to devour Melody as well, and Melody happily complies. And when the deliveryman bursts in on them, he smilingly accepts their invitation to join in a ménage à trois. For her part, Melody realizes from her bitter past experiences that this idyllic state of bliss cannot last indefinitely, and so when the inevitable happens, and her lovers apologetically depart for good, Melody accepts their defections with philosophical resignation.

Meanwhile, Melody has found solace in satisfying a childhood dream of owning and playing a guitar. Brief flashbacks show a child actress playing Melody as she first steals a guitar from a music shop, and is then in tears when she is forced to return the guitar to the shop in the company of her irate mother.

The guitar is the one possession she saves when all her credit cards are maxed out, and her apartment is padlocked. Then the seemingly miraculous happens. She returns to the clinic and is told that her tumor has disappeared since it could no longer recognize the body that was suddenly so lavishly fed. Melody is at first actually angry that she has been medically misled into bankruptcy.

What happens next is too delicious a surprise to be spoiled by my telling you in advance. You have to see it for yourself. It is that out-of-the-depths triumphant.

asarris@observer.com