Two Small Bodies

"If you want false hope, go to church," snaps Fred Ward in the film Two Small Bodies. "This is reality."

Ward (Henry and June)plays a police detective who's investigating the disappearance (and possible murder) of two kids. Suzy Amis (Ballad of Little Jo)plays the missing children's' mother, a cocktail waitress with loose morals and bad luck. She may have committed the kidnappings, but Ward is mostly interested in her sexual habits. They're the only characters in the movie, but they succeed in taking sexual politics to the level of full-scale war.

"It's a little bit in the manner of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Night Porter," says Beth B., the director of Two Small Bodies. "But it also has touches of Sam Fuller and Joseph Losey."

She was barely able to squeeze in the time to talk by phone from Los Angeles while pursuing a hectic week of meetings. Since the late '70s, Beth B. has been the most critically prominent filmmaker of the Punk movement. But with Two Small Bodies, she's now entering the major leagues with a film that invokes favorable comparison to the works of Robert Altman and R. W. Fassbinder. Two Small Bodies is her most polished and emotionally satisfying movie, and it easily ranks as one of the finest films of the year.

"After doing several larger films - Vortex and Salvation - I was finding it very hard to raise money," explains B. "So I decided to go back to my roots with a simpler production."

A friend suggested making a film version of the play Two Small Bodies by Neal Bell, and B. felt an instant rapport with the text. "A lot of it borders on the question of fantasy and reality, and is really about the internal drama between the two characters."

The twists and turns contained within the vitriolic exchanges between Ward and Amis plays like a witch's brew of seductive gestures, macho posturings and marital recriminations. "But I think it has a very hopeful ending," says B. "You have to go through a lot of shit to get there, but that's the way life really is."

In many ways, Two Small Bodies is a radical departure from the director's earlier, more rough-hewn movies. Aside from the intense performances by Ward and Amis, the film is structured with a series of complex camera movements that visually entangle the actors in the intricate web of their own deceits. "I wanted the camera to become a third person in the room with them," B. explains. "That way, I could chart the psychological differences and changes taking place between them."

The result is something akin to a feverish dance by the damned. Yet in the end, when their characters have reached the point of crazed exhaustion, Ward and Amis discover the meaning of compassion.

"I'm still attracted to the dark side of life," B. confesses. "But I'm feeling that there's more hope now in things involving men and women."