Choose Me: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

In Choose Me, this romantic sensibility hangs in the air, its characters’ yearning a magnetic force drawing them together. Dr. Nancy Love becomes the roommate of Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), a former sex worker turned proprietor of Eve’s Lounge, and a confident bachelorette with a principled opposition to getting hitched: she has broken up too many marriages to want one of her own. We first see Mickey (Keith Carradine, one of several Altman regulars whom Rudolph brought into his own revolving troupe of performers) escaping from a mental institution by casually strolling out the front door, before he lands at the bar of Eve’s. This dimly lit watering hole is a Hopperesque meeting place for the lonely, the listless, and the down on their luck. Ordering a shot of Smirnoff and a Guinness, Mickey locks eyes with Eve—who is simultaneously fending off the advances of her motorbike-riding barback, Billy Ace (John Larroquette). Mickey is in turn chatted up by a perky poet named Pearl (Rae Dawn Chong), whose thuggish French husband, Zack (Patrick Bauchau), is, she knows, sleeping with Eve.

Apparently, everyone is a creature of lust but Nancy, and yet it’s Nancy, or at least her voice, they run to when morning comes and the booze has worn off. Eve and Pearl both anonymously broadcast their grievances on The Love Line, and Eve’s suitors—Billy, Zack, and Mickey—all try phoning Eve at home only to reach her gently prying new roomie, who goes by Ann when she’s not on the air. Nancy anchors Choose Me with her aloof, analytical nature, her bookish manner harking back to the deliberately unsexy Midge, the friend-zoned sidekick played by Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo. But unlike poor Midge, it’s not others who impose prudishness on Nancy but Nancy herself.

Eve, on the other hand, is the woman people flock to when they want to abandon their inhibitions and seek out a warm embrace—be it hers or that of the liquor she serves. In Warren’s hands, Eve is an assured seductress without the hard shell of a conventional siren, the depth of her experience legible in her scrutinizing gaze. Nancy and Eve are the film’s two structuring poles, their divergent dispositions guiding the narrative’s trajectory. When they chat on The Love Line, the show’s advice format collapses, as Eve’s on-the-ground insights rival Nancy’s more theoretical conclusions. When Nancy flees, the morning she arrives to move in, at the sound of a man in Eve’s shower, it’s not that she judges Eve for her hookup; it’s that sex, in her mind, is such an intensely private affair that she must keep it rigorously compartmentalized.

For both women, control and emotional security are key—it’s why Eve prefers the simplicity of strictly physical relationships and Nancy gets off either by filtering her own desire through others’ sex lives or summoning the fiery side of herself only when alone. In a cheeky literalization of her boundaries, Nancy/Ann turns out to have something of a split personality: in one scene, she role-plays a sexy dinner date by herself, abandoning her usual muted pastel sweaters and knee-length skirts for a slicked-back hairdo and plunging neckline.

“You can’t trust my connections to reality because I was born into fantasy,” Rudolph once said (his father, Oscar Rudolph, worked on silent-film sets and became a prolific television director). The filmmaker’s work is often marked by his golden-age cinephilia: take the Barbara Stanwyck–style revenge drama of Remember My Name, or the hard-boiled neonoir of Trouble in Mind (1985), with its venetian blinds and angular, rain-slicked alleyways. Yet these films aren’t nostalgic for midcentury America so much as they draw on the heightened styles and moods of classic Hollywood to create dreamlike temporalities—just as in dreams our feelings are amplified and unbounded by waking logic.

The movie posters in Pearl’s room—including All About Eve, Tales of Manhattan, and Don’t Bother to Knock—nod to Choose Me’s melting pot of genre templates. But Rudolph’s film has a cosmic factor all its own, coincidences and twists of fate that are cranked up several notches from realism, and that feed its droll and circumstantial sense of humor. Eve, Pearl, and Nancy have no idea they’re speaking to each other during their consultations on The Love Line. Eve’s Lounge was previously owned by another Eve, with whom Mickey was once in love. Mickey’s own outlandish backstory seems too wild—too cinematic—to be true: at various points, he claims to have been a poetry professor at Yale, an award-winning photographer, a fighter pilot, and a spy. “God, you’ve been a lot of places and done a lot of things,” sighs Pearl like a schoolgirl. Later, we glimpse proof that backs up his stories.

The timeless suspended reality of Choose Me doesn’t preclude it from having real stakes or wrestling with modern sexual politics. If Mickey is a heartthrob, he’s not a clean archetype. He and the other men in the film are prone to violence, which usually bursts out in spats over their prized possessions: women and money. Zack and Mickey butt heads or come to blows on several occasions over such territorial matters: when Mickey wins big at a gambling club; when Zack comes home and finds Mickey taking nude photographs of Pearl; when Zack finds Mickey and Eve in her parked car, where the two have just (nearly) declared their love. These tussles are sloppy and clownish—attestations that big, macho statements (like threatening to kill your wife’s lover) are more absurd than romantic. The no-nonsense Eve refuses to involve herself in these displays, but the more fanciful Pearl can be swept up. In a scene where she calls Dr. Love, we see Pearl’s face, puffy and bruised after Zack smacked her. “Even though he roughs me up, at least he cares enough to do it!” she says. Far from condoning domestic abuse, Choose Me reminds us that sex and love are mysterious in part because they can scramble our minds and invite destruction.

Traditional heterosexual relationships are often rooted in screwed-up understandings of domination and submission. Choose Me (an explicitly heterosexual film) treats instances like Mickey and Billy each escorting Eve to her car as blatantly transactional, advising us that such supposedly chivalrous romantic gestures don’t necessarily function that differently from paid rendezvous. Savvy women like Eve know this all too well. Demonstrating the ease with which amorous displays can become menacing by expertly genre-shifting from gauzy melodrama in one moment to thriller in the next, Rudolph brings these grim sexual realities to the fore, fearlessly and discomfitingly. In this sense, Choose Me is a vision not of what should be but what is: a world in which people fall in love against their better instincts; in which the ugliness of desire can be mistaken for beauty.

Especially for the modern viewer, Eve’s bold declaration of heterosexuality—“I like men!”—might come across as something of a confession of masochism. Unlike the idealistic Pearl, however, who romanticizes both Mickey’s gallantry and the brutal acts of her husband, Eve has no delusions that alpha males are anything but foolish. All the same, she is drawn to masculine imperfection, even as she remains hyperaware of the potential consequences—the thrill of playing with fire is too great, which is why she limits the duration of these games to one night. In her apartment, we see portraits of men that resemble Egon Schiele paintings—their subjects are shirtless, distorted, borderline grotesque and yet oddly appealing—underscoring her clearsightedness. She has her own set of rigid boundaries, her own logical codes that govern her relationships, allowing her to steer clear of emotional precarity: Why get married when everyone’s getting divorced? When you can be a liberated woman rather than being owned by someone else? Both Nancy and Eve are upended by Mickey’s loving, however: after he seduces Nancy, she embraces the joys of spontaneous sex and begins living her life on her own passionate terms, no longer through the experiences of others. When Eve finds out that Nancy slept with Mickey, she’s terrified by her own surge of jealousy. “I don’t own any man,” she cries. “And no man owns me!” Her words are practical, but the shaky timbre of her voice, the cracked look on her face, tells us she, too, can be vulnerable—and maybe she’s ready to be.

Perhaps, given the prevalence of failure—and backward gender norms—in marriage, there’s something of a thrill to tying the knot anyway. In Choose Me’s final moments, Mickey and Eve reunite on a windy rooftop. They each threaten to commit suicide because of their love for the other, then poke fun at such romantic hyperbole. Mickey, who is twice divorced and claims he could marry any woman he kisses (but kisses only women he’d marry), doesn’t seem like the type to be sincere about matrimony, but maybe, Choose Me seems to say, matters of love and devotion aren’t black-and-white. We can, to paraphrase Raymond Carver, genuinely be in love with someone one day and the next fall in love with someone else. The potential transience of our feelings doesn’t diminish their truth or intensity in the moment, the dissonance of which fact is foregrounded in the film’s last shot: Mickey and Eve as man and wife, taking a bus to Vegas. Rudolph’s camera pushes in to their faces, which move through expressions of fear, ambivalence, passion, and tenderness. Love isn’t a static experience but a perpetual and restless process of self-questioning: I’m in love . . . but not really . . . or maybe?