‘Love Comes Lately’: Falling Out of Love and Into Bed

The great Polish-born chronicler of 20th-century Jewry, Isaac Bashevis Singer, wrote in the introduction to a 1981 collection of his short stories: “Unlike the novel, which can absorb and even forgive lengthy digressions, flashbacks, and loose construction, the story must aim directly at its climax.” Jan Schütte’s meandering new film, “Love Comes Lately,” based on three of Singer’s stories, falls short of that, but its digressions can be nonetheless sweetly transporting.The main plot, which provides a frame for the other two, is taken from “The Briefcase.” It follows Max Kohn (Otto Tausig), a moderately well-known Vienna-born fiction writer, now in his late 70s, who lives in New York and travels the Northeast on the university lecture circuit. His girlfriend of 12 years, Reisle (Rhea Pearlman), manages his schedule and takes dictation over the phone; Max thanks her with infidelities and indignities, and she replies with kvetching and suspicion. On the road, his talks on topics such as fate and free will in modern literature are losing their audience to campus hockey tournaments, and graduate students opt to write theses on Kafka over Kohn.Neatly embedded within the primary thread, which follows Max from New York to Hartford and beyond, are two of Singer’s Miami Beach stories on sex and aging. Each tale features Mr. Tausig, a Viennese-born stage actor, as an elderly protagonist yearning vaguely for companionship but resistant to sudden change.The first story is ambiguous — it could be a dream or a short story written by Max — about a retiree who travels south for one last adventure before undergoing prostate surgery. In a fleshed-out version of Singer’s short story “Alone,” Elizabeth Peña portrays a much more alluring hunchback than Singer’s, whom he described in the pages of the original story as a witch and a hag, writing that “only the snout and tail were missing.” Ms. Peña, by contrast, is luscious and mysterious, almost a reincarnation of the volatile dream lover she played in Adrian Lyne’s nightmarish “Jacob’s Ladder.”The second embedded tale is one that Max writes on the fly. He reads it aloud at a guest-speaking appointment after carelessly losing his notes during yet another brief affair, this one with a former student played by a glowingly gorgeous Barbara Hershey (the film’s most fleshed-out female character in every sense). In this story, based on “Old Love,” a Florida retiree strikes up a relationship with his trim, pert next-door neighbor (Tovah Feldshuh) that begins and ends in the course of an afternoon.Though this segment is actually a short filmed by Mr. Schütte in 2001, it’s dropped seamlessly — or rather, with the seams showing effectively — into the surrounding narrative. The film isn’t always so sure-footed, though, and it occasionally drifts into a weird stiltedness that, while faithful to Singer’s dialogue and settings, never feels as beautifully inevitable.All three bachelor protagonists share at least one notable characteristic: Middle-age women find them irresistible. One widow lifts a glass of champagne and knowingly toasts “to the future.” Another introduces herself and then suggests marriage over the salad course. And a seductive cleaning woman enters a hotel room in the middle of the night and appears to be driven mad when she’s rejected.Despite its title, therefore, “Love Comes Lately,” which opens in the city on Friday, is really a story about sex and death, not love. It’s about the question of “why people are born and why they must die” — everything in between is optional, of course — and how they amuse themselves as they approach the latter dismal requirement.Max is increasingly absentminded, insomniac, and fatigued, but though his physical prowess is declining, he is still vigorous in one area: his writing life. He’s a swordsman of the page, attacking his typewriter in the middle of the night, diligently plowing through proofs on the train between lecture appointments. It’s in this way that Mr. Schütte shows him to be, in Singer’s words, “making the ‘while’ worthwhile.”Mr. Tausig portrays each man with baffled charm; they’re all wide-eyed golden boys from the old country asking, “How can this be?” each time a fresh woman approaches. It’s difficult to know if Max and his doppelgangers are sincerely surprised by the surfeit of female attention they receive. These innocent Casanovas’ helpless “Who, me?” shtick has obviously worked many, many times before. Like Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman (both characters develop prostate trouble), and John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom — all sex-hungry protagonists aged by their authors into decrepitude — Max and his alter egos can be exasperating in their twilights: absurdly lucky in sex and attachment, and somehow uncomprehending right to the end.Despite a lifetime of this good fortune, however, Max winds up probably impotent due to a prostate problem. “After what the doctor told me, the only thing a man can do is to shoot himself,” he mutters to the nurse, who just giggles and reminds him that a man can please a woman in other ways.

‘Love Comes Lately’: Falling Out of Love and Into Bed

‘Love Comes Lately’: Falling Out of Love and Into Bed

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