Choose Me

There is hardly a moment in the whole film when I knew for sure what was going to happen next, yet I didn’t feel manipulated; I felt as if the movie were giving itself the freedom to be completely spontaneous.

Often very funny as well as gorgeous to look at in its ineffable blend of realism and rhapsody, it comes on a little like a free jazz improvisation on the vulnerability of the human heart to the ecstasies and disenchantments that attend it in permanent orbit.

Structured like a farce but filmed like a Qaalude dream, this marvelously performed fairy tale packs a lot of style into its minuscule budget. [19 Nov 1984, p.135]

Perhaps Rudolph is sending out a message about love, a la Rohmer, or maybe he's just having a strange kind of fun. Choose Me is just entertaining enough, in its eccentric, soap- operatic way, so that it doesn't matter. [21 Dec 1984, p.D22]

Rudolph’s off-center characterizations and looping dramatic rhythms keep the tone complex and varied, and the film has a lovely choreographed quality that’s only slightly marred by some indifferent cinematography.

It's giddy in a magical, pseudo-sultry way -- it seems to be set in a poet's dream of a red-light district.

If the film sometimes gives the impression of too much talent in the service of too little, that talent is evident all the same.