“Force of Circumstance” can’t sustain this suavely contrived mixture of dis- and reorientation. Still, Béar’s spectacle of downtown artists playing spy vs. spy in an assortment of Washington locations — a descendant of Louis Feuillade’s World War I serials in which fantastic crimes were staged on the streets of Paris — transcends the soggy plot, created in collaboration with the East Village writer Craig Gholson.
Mysteries proliferate and evaporate like puddles after summer rain. The envoy and the bodyguard wander through Georgetown searching for a colonial mansion. Mouallem, always wearing a new outfit, is never far away, hoping to contact the feisty journalist Katrina (Jessica Stutchbury), who is having an affair with Hans (Tom Wright), the dissolute rich boy looking to unload his ancestral home.
Béar, a central figure in New York’s 1980s art world, has said that her film was inspired by the Casablanca bread riots in 1981. The movie is dated less by its historical references than by its green-character-displaying computer screens and a cast seemingly culled from a Club 57 theme party: Major (a member of Squat Theater); a pre-Hollywood Steve Buscemi; the musician Evan Lurie; the scene-maker Glenn O’Brien; the performance artist Rockets Redglare; and the filmmaker Eric Mitchell, who cast both Stutchbury and Wright in his own downtown movies. Capped with a fez, speaking some sort of French patois, Mitchell brings his own campy aura to the movie, including the portentous punchline: “Choice is a Western concept.”
The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin, who had little sympathy for the film, wrote that “the avidity with which Ms. Béar, absorbs and mimics big-budget clichés is a lot more impressive than the way those clichés have been used.” Indeed, “Force of Circumstance,” which appropriates a title used by both W. Somerset Maugham and Simone de Beauvoir, is more an art object than a conventional movie, even ending with a screen full of actual documents, as a conceptual piece from the early ’70s might.
This faux “thriller” has a sustained look, an intriguing cast, an entertaining attitude and a propulsive score. Its main flaw is the script — which, given the current Writers Guild of America strike, makes it all the more timely.
Force of Circumstance
Through May 30 at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan; moma.org.
