FAST FOOD FAST WOMEN []
Often charming, but occasionally trite or sitcom-esque indie about love and loneliness in Manhattan. Running time: 98 minutes. At the Lincoln Plaza, the First & 62d and the Quad.
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LIKE Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” Amos Kollek’s often charming romantic comedy “Fast Food Fast Women” is one of those films that takes place in a director’s bizarre fantasy version of New York.
In Kubrick’s Big Apple, imagined from his English exile, delightful NYU coeds moonlight as hookers and the rich attend tediously formal orgies in Long Island castles.
In the Manhattan envisioned by Kollek (the Israeli-born maker of “Sue” and son of former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek), bosomy women disrobe on fire escapes – to the delight of homeless men and teenage boys – and artsy peep-show strippers turn out to be romantically interested in elderly customers.
And in both, the city’s predominantly South Asian cabbies have been magically replaced by white guys.
One such taxi driver – he’s an unpublished novelist in his spare time – is Bruno (Jamie Harris, son of Richard and brother of Jared). He gets set up with Bella (Anna Thomson), a skinny, doll-like woman in her mid-30s who gave up a job on Wall Street to work in a diner patronized mainly by bantering old retirees.
The timing isn’t bad because Bella is finally realizing that her 10-year affair with a ghastly, much older Broadway producer will never culminate in his leaving his wife for her.
But Bruno is a womanizer, whose ex-wife has just run off to the Himalayas, dumping their two little children in his lap.
As their relationship works its way out, you witness two parallel journeys, both involving old guys from the diner.
One of them – and it’s the most interesting and unusual story in the film – involves widower Paul (famed acting teacher Robert Modica), who falls for but mishandles Emily (Louise Lasser), a more frankly sexual fellow-sixtysomething he meets through a lonely hearts column.
The other deals with grumpy Seymour (Vincent Argo), who’s infatuated with a stripper (Valerie Geffner).
At least one story is resolved in a fairy-tale fashion that makes it clear that Kollek (unlike Kubrick) knows that his Manhattan is a never-never land.
Despite a script that occasionally calls for some embarrassingly awkward lines, Kollek’s cast generally acquits itself well. Thomson’s Bella is heartfelt and always believable. And there are enjoyable performances by Lasser, Modica and Angelica Torn as a Russian prostitute with a bad stammer.