Chilly Scenes of Winter: Nowhere Fast

A contemporary viewer of the film might in fact miss the many pop-culture citations that are a crucial part of its emotional grammar, detached as they are from its bleak landscape of station wagons, boxy government buildings, suburban streets. But that contrast is key, pointing to what Charles tries to compensate for with his idealization of Laura (Mary Beth Hurt), a secretary at his government job whom he meets during a period when she’s separated from her husband—in a meet-cute, flanked by walls of filing cabinets, that buzzes with chemistry (and is also impossible to watch without thinking about current laws against workplace sexual harassment). The film opens on a noirish note, with Charles looking back, bitterly, on what he’s lost: at the end of the workday, Charles, in a trench coat, leaving the building with the rest of the nine-to-five crowd, stops to buy candy from a blind salesman whose rote query—“What do ya have?”—prompts an interior monologue in voice-over: “I don’t have Laura.” It’s hard to say, exactly, how knowing Charles is: he’s hip but not that hip; he drinks vodka at his desk, listens to rock-and-roll cassettes, and knows the chatter about Frank Zappa, but unfortunately for his boss (who misconstrues his smart-aleck detachment for sexual liberation, which he tries to borrow for his “frustrated” son), Charles confesses he’s “not as up on these things” as his boss thinks. Where does Charles fit into this world of brown suits and cheap furnishings, of typing pools and “reports of reports”? 
He “could have been” at Woodstock, 
but he wasn’t. Unlike his well-adjusted sister, he can’t commit to an average life, either, rejecting another coworker, the sweet, clueless Betty (Nora Heflin), for a snowballing passion for Laura.

And seething under the surface of Charles’s dull world is a darkness irreducible to navel-gazing angst. Early on, at a loose-elbowed dinner with his sister and their friends, his phone rings; it’s his mother, and we hear through the phone, “I was going to kill myself!”—a cut in the rhythm of the scene. Just as abruptly, Charles tunes out and begins thinking about Laura, as smooth jazz kicks in on the soundtrack, the music of his idée fixe. There’s something sick in this world, and it renders any jauntiness suspect. In what can only be described as a casting coup, Charles’s mother, Clara, is played by Gloria Grahame, whom we first see seminaked in her bathtub, a radio playing vaudeville-style honky-tonk piano. With her negligees, alcoholism, self-dramatization, and compulsive male-attention-seeking, she plays the role of a late-life Blanche DuBois—a character who, as some viewers will recall, was already an ironic citation of the kind of Hollywood archetypes originally played by Grahame. Her scenes with Charles have a ghoulish theatricality, but real death is everywhere: we learn that his grandfather killed himself and that his father died on a bus at age thirty-nine. “You know what I think? I think she decided to go nuts because it’s easier that way,” Charles tells his sister. “It’s sort of tempting, isn’t it?”

From the beginning, Laura intuits that Charles may have gone that way too: “Are you nuts?” she asks him, only half flirtatiously, when they first meet. One effect of the film’s scrambled chronology is that we’re never quite sure how crazy Charles is being: we start to wonder, each time we see him, what stage of his obsessiveness we’re finding him in, whether each declaration is (at least somewhat) within the bounds of appropriateness or wildly outside it, though by the time we hear that Laura was only living with him for a couple of months, we’ve gotten some idea. Even their ostensibly sweet scenes together have a dark edge, and we’re never sure where they’re going—up or down. Charles imagines himself the romantic hero, but we might notice, on an early date, that Laura is actually crying in the kitchen, and though Charles comforts her with a hug, there’s a glint of frustration in his eye. Gradually, over the course of the film, Heard allows his character’s intensity to shade into menace, as Charles pursues Laura with a focus that veers into self-abasement before coming in for the attack. As their interactions become increasingly unhinged, so does Charles’s deployment of cliché: for instance, in a manic scene in which he tries to get back at Laura for setting a couple of boundaries by telling her, with an archly theatrical smirk, that “I don’t think I should have to give up . . . ‘drinking with the guys,’ do you?” Laura laughs—it is funny, his fake bowling and poker nights, the allusions to an Archie Bunker–style masculinity that Charles clearly does not have—but the scene quickly turns terrorizing. We almost can’t believe what we’re hearing (did he really just threaten to “beat the shit” out of her?)—one of the many times Micklin Silver places the spectator in Laura’s position, unsure of how to take Charles’s outbursts. “I was only kidding,” he tells her, and us, tossing a Magic 8 Ball in her lap, but even if his lines are prefabricated (like the 8 Ball’s answers), their emotional violence is real.

Would this have telegraphed “abuse” in 1979? Laura seems more annoyed than threatened. Micklin Silver herself considered the film “a kind of weird romantic comedy” and made it clear in interviews that she liked Charles and felt an affinity with his infatuation. But Chilly Scenes also allows Charles to be unlikable—if never wholly repellent—and it’s to Heard’s credit that he doesn’t flinch from his character’s excesses. Infamously, in its original studio release, the film was packaged as a comedy called Head over Heels, with a trailer that actively repressed its mordant tone. Three years later, the film was rereleased, without Head over Heels’ happy ending (which, despite its hewing more closely to the novel, Micklin Silver never loved), as Chilly Scenes of Winter. The film in its final form delivers a more pungent irony: Charles imagines a love for Laura that would redeem his life, but it’s a fantasy almost entirely disconnected from the actual person in front of him—romance played by a one-man band—and it’s hard not to balk at the fact that Laura continues to engage at all. But Chilly Scenes never settles on a denunciation of Charles and his obsession, either, suggesting instead that his love for her is genuine, however narcissistic it may be. Laura is conflicted, both passive and unexpectedly forthright, and she holds on to a thread of their relationship long past their separation; Hurt plays her with a teasing smile that abruptly freezes and fades. She belongs alongside Micklin Silver’s other wistful, ambivalent women (Isabelle Grossman, played by Amy Irving in 1988’s Crossing Delancey, comes to mind), but Laura is even more opaque than they are, although her refusal to definitively dismiss Charles at the end of the film has an assertive punch. “Nothing,” Charles tells his best friend, Sam (Peter Riegert), when he asks what happened, “nothing.” She’s just not that into him.

Chilly Scenes of Winter is a prickly film, its tone almost defiantly hard to read. It may be Micklin Silver at her grimmest—there’s a drawn, tense element even to the more comedic scenes. But she still gives us pockets of gentleness, most generously in the form of Riegert, who plays Sam with a wry playfulness that’s easy to root for, as when he tags along to Charles’s most daring and icky maneuver, undertaken to get into Laura’s home. That scene—in which Charles and Sam fake an interest in the A-frame houses sold by Laura’s husband (Mark Metcalf), who unwittingly invites them over for drinks—showcases Micklin Silver’s gift for supporting characters: she lets them come down just over the edge of camp, allowing them to color scenes with an exuberance that cuts against the melancholy of her protagonists and keeps them from becoming maudlin. Ox, Laura’s “tall, dull guy” husband, with his wooden salesman’s pitch and turtleneck, is another one of these; around the coffee table, Charles and Sam, with their floppy hair and sarcasm, throw his square earnestness into relief. It’s worth noting the subtlety with which the scene treats Ox’s assumption, implicitly encouraged by Sam, that he and Charles are a gay couple: where a less thoughtful director might have played that for broad and phobic comedy, Micklin Silver simply shows Riegert raising his eyebrows sardonically.