The film begins when both girls--Carla (Heather Graham), who has a face like a golden lollipop, and Lou (Natasha Gregson Wagner), a cute motormouth--show up outside Blake's loft expecting to surprise him on his return from L.A. Quickly sizing up their predicament, they break into his loft and team up to squash the enemy.
Lying in wait when he walks in, they let him carry on for a while in privacy. He sings Vivaldi at the top of his lungs, tickles the keys on his grand piano and then leaves smoochy-obscene messages on each of their answering machines. When Carla finally presents herself to him, Blake is stunned but adjusts almost instantaneously to the intrusion. He wonders out loud how she got in without a key.
Blake is enough of a rogue to know there's more to come; his radar for the static of sex maneuvers is acute. When Lou makes her grand entrance, we can see his mind clicking away at hyper-speed. He's been found out, but he won't admit it. Instead, he sidles about the loft waiting for a break in the action. His nonstop patter is like a verbal smokescreen--a military maneuver to keep the girls at bay until he can rethink his rap.
For Blake, this new situation is ripe with theatrical possibility, and he's enough of an actor to recognize the part he's been handed. As he twists and turns and boo-hoos his way out of the girls' clutches, he begins to get off on his predicament. Carla and Lou may have his number, but he's got theirs, too--that explains why they stick around for his act instead of storming out right away. When Carla says to him, "Did it excite you that you were always in danger of being caught?" she already knows the answer.
Toback is trying for an erotic comedy that expresses a modern sexual mood. At the same time, it's unmistakably a Toback film--which means it's centered on his own carnal itch. (His best, and best-known, previous films are Fingers and The Pick-Up Artist, which also starred Downey). Toback's gamble is that his own obsessions and the culture's sexual buzz will vibrate in unison. And for the most part, the gamble pays off--his film is full of feints and jabs that are closer to the way the sex game is played now than most of the current frothy Hollywood romances. What the film is trying to get across is that the AIDS-era generation of sex players has gotten frisky; people are ready to experiment again. Toback doesn't make a big moralistic point out of any of this--it's just something that comes through in the way his characters carry on. The comedy in what he's showing us is that, even though Blake and Carla and Lou are swingers, they take fidelity seriously. They're promiscuous prudes.
At 84 minutes, Two Girls and a Guy unfolds almost entirely in real time in Blake's loft. (It was shot in a speedy eleven days.) And yet you never feel like you're watching a cramped three-act play. Toback opens up the loft with his camera; visually, there's always something alluring going on. But mostly he has the good sense to let his eye just follow the actors, and they're always worth watching. This is probably Downey's best work--even better than the neglected True Believer and Chaplin. It's a tour-de-force performance, but it doesn't have the effect of a big star turn. It's too intuitive and free-form for that.
Downey creates the role right in front of our eyes. His acting is all in the present tense; it has the immediacy of a live encounter. It's not just Blake in this film who appears to be startling himself. Downey is startling himself, too--he's jazzier and more subversive than he's ever been before. When Blake looks deeply into a mirror during one of his timeouts with the girls and gets all rubber-faced and goony, he could be cracking apart. But what really seems to be happening is that he's shocking himself into sanity. He mutters into the mirror, "Is this what you want to do? Hurt people?" and he means it. And yet he's so self-infatuated that even this act of penitence is a piece of performance art. And a form of seduction, too. His hang-dog droop is a come-on in disguise; it invites the girls' protectiveness.
The centerpiece sex scene between Blake and Carla is remarkably well-staged. Shot in shadow, it's like a quick fever dream. (To get an R rating, the scene was trimmed slightly--with no appreciable loss, from a version I saw last fall at the Toronto film festival.) The messy mindlessness of sex is at the core of this scene--and the movie. It's a film about how sex messes up your scruples and makes you less admirable than you want to be. It's also about how enticing it is to be disreputable. Blake can't reconcile his feelings about his girlfriends, and he spouts therapy-ese--he tells Lou and Carla about the need to "confront." But he's not just mouthing off. On some level, Blake really does care for both girls. He would like to be better than he is--faithful, even--but he's too honest a charlatan to hold out much hope.
Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner have their own distinctive performing styles, and it takes a while for them to mesh. At first, bantering back and forth in the loft, the girls are so cadenced and lickety-split that the effect is almost like vintage screwball comedy. Carla looks at Lou with low-key disbelief: Can this really be her competition? But then the film settles down and we begin to see the emotional shifts in the performances. Carla is won over by Lou's poignant, jitterbug spunk, and Lou is dazzled by Carla's prettiness. You get the feeling she's honored to be part of the team--Blake's team.
Toback's scenario, for all its faux feminist mea culpas, is still a classic male fantasy. Blake is the guy with two girls. He is, however, enough of a narcissist to be repelled by the idea of a threesome. (Blake all by himself is practically a threesome.) He likes his women one at a time--he's a traditionalist at heart. But he's still enthralled by what the girls do to him. Even though he rants and moans about it, he loves the fact that he can't figure out what Carla and Lou will do next. In the midst of his own ramblings, he lets them ramble on, knowing they'll trip themselves up and provide him with an opening. For Blake, women are an endless source of maddening happenstance. He loves them because they confirm his own screw-loose take on the world.
Toback doesn't attempt to "distance" himself from his erotic obsessions, but unlike some of his other work, the obsessions here don't take over. Two Girls and a Guy is the work of an obsessive who has developed a light touch--though some of his more outright themes and pronouncements can be heavy-going. Blake is given a mother fixation that seems to be in the movie in order to set up a deep and tragic finale. (It's unconvincing.) I could also have done without the poster of Jules and Jim in Blake's loft; the invited comparison with Truffaut's film does not exactly work in Toback's favor.
Still, not many films these days attempt to root around in unpleasantries the way this one does. Toback doesn't smooth out his characters' ruffles. When Carla accuses Blake of not having any "real" feelings, she's right. But she's also wrong. Just because he's an actor doesn't mean he's an empty vessel. When he recites a soliloquy from Hamlet, he's astonishing, and at that moment, you don't care what--or who--he had to go through in order to be that good. Toback gets at the essential amorality at the core of being an artist. This may be why Downey, who made this film between bouts in rehab, has such resonance in his role. Blake may be a coddled prince, but he's no poseur. For all his scams, he does have real feelings. He comes on like a con artist, but he has the soul of an authentic one. Like it or not.
Two Girls and a Guy.
Directed and written by James Toback. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner.
