Avis des critiques

Filled with great physical comedy and songs that are so awful they’re great, “Ishtar” is a movie whose time is now.

I didn’t catch up with this film maudit until 2013, seeing it at BAM with a friend (and coeval) who, far wiser than I, had long been a fan. That screening remains one of the most memorable of my life, an event that provided the rare opportunity to discover a wildly unpredictable movie more than a quarter century removed from its initial ignominy.

It hardly seems possible that Elaine May's Ishtar (1987) is about to celebrate its 30th anniversary. I first saw the film on its original release, and have returned to it many times over the years, always with pleasure and delight. But in my mind, it has yet to take on the status of a revered classic, instead retaining that sense of freshness one associates with recent discoveries.

If the film had been made in 1975 instead of 1987, it may not have fared any better with moviegoers than previous May films, but it may have acquired those films' reputations as idiosyncratic, misunderstood masterpieces featuring two of the decade's most charismatic actors. Asking Beatty and Hoffman to play tone-deaf, middle-aged dopes who become unwitting secret agents turned out to be incredibly smart casting, but it's such a peculiar choice that it can take the whole movie to get used to.

Ishtar is frequently very funny, and nearly always original. No matter what hack comedians and newspaper columnists want to believe, "bomb" does not automatically equate to "awful." But while Ishtar's reputation has rightly improved among cinephiles in recent years, it's no masterpiece. Whether or not May had any burning need to make the movie, Ishtar certainly feels like the work of people with more money and charm than workable ideas.

While the majority of the film takes place among the blind camels, street cafés, and sandy dunes of north Africa, the film's first twenty minutes in NYC alone—including a flashback montage of the duo's first meeting and subsequent creative process—are funnier than most of today's studio comedies, you smuck.

The small-scale Ishtar's attacks are as indirect and seemingly aimless as its main characters' camel trek across one very small stretch of Moroccan desert. Like with most of May's other films, the butt of Ishtar's jokes is the vast disparity between American men's sense of worth and their credentials to fill their programmed role as masters of their domains.

Ishtar" has become synonymous with "absurdly expensive folly" when it should simply be seen as one of the strangest, deepest, funniest, most exuberant, and yet most painful comic explorations of the artistic life (and, for that matter, of American political chicanery worldwide) that exists.

Here's a conspiracy theory for you: Ishtar is intentionally terrible. Director Elaine May, one half of the team that founded American improv, is too smart a writer to be this unintentionally inept. Numerous lines and gags support this notion, and the almost universally reviled Ishtar plays like a career suicide note. Here is a writer who no longer wants to direct, so she constructs a bomb with a self destruct sequence initiated by the equipment projecting her movie.

Affectionate towards its idiot characters and vicious towards its political targets, Elaine May's improvisatory satire is one of the ultimate Hollywood films maudits--a massive critical and commercial flop that seems to get funnier and sharper the further its disastrous release recedes into film history.

The picture moves at a relatively brisk pace, and Beatty and Hoffman display consistently good comic timing and delivery, with Hoffman doing some particularly inspired heavy lifting in a desert arms-auction scene relying on gibberish and bluff. It cannot be emphasized enough, however, that it'll only work for the individual viewer who actually enjoys that sort of humor, that is, very broad and pronounced schtick of the Abbott and Costello/Hope and Crosby type.

Just as I revere Beatty for his work with Kazan, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman and Hal Ashby, I believe the lothario looker to be one of the most underrated comic actors in the business. In his knack for it, the man is near brilliant. Where did he prove this best? Oddly, in two that place him in a musical mode -- the great Elaine May's Ishtar, one of the most misunderstood and under-watched comedies of all time and Bulworth, a film that's almost a masterpiece.