On a random chilly day in Vancouver, a wealthy woman of undetermined age named Frances Austen spots a boy, teetering somewhere between his late teens and early twenties, sitting on a park bench adjacent to her home. The day grows colder and is then is finally saturated with rain, yet he doesn’t budge from the bench. Frances observes this from her window, and for reasons either of benevolence or a piqued interest, she invites the boy, seemingly mute, into her home. And from here, an unorthodox and obsessive relationship begins.
Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park is a movie about sex, though not necessarily in the way you’d expect from the description above. More specifically, it’s a tragic and mysterious film about a woman whose unmoored sexual blossoming combusts with her rigid repression. Sandy Dennis’s Frances Austen is practically a zombie of ritual who lives in a sarcophagus of high-class privilege occupied by the waxy specters of her late parents’ peers. We know little about her other than what we get by way of light expository dialogue, and her direct, taciturn demeanor. Her daily activities don’t seem to include any kind of employment but are instead spent entertaining, shopping, listening to selections from her utterly square record collection, and playing bocce ball with people twice her age. She exists as if her life force were awarded to her through a probate judgement along with the house and its servants.
This is juxtaposed with the life of The Boy, credited as such and played with a bright and impish charm by Michael Burns. Detangled from his large, overwhelming family glimpsed in one masterful exterior shot of his cramped, multi-level home that reveals multitudes while saying very little, he seems to float on a wave of pure life, his only real connection being that of his free-spirited sister who squats in a docked, derelict boat with her hippie boyfriend. It is with her that we learn that he is not mute but is instead a curious observer with some rather eccentric tendencies.
In Altman’s first film to really put a real examining glass to human nature, That Cold Day in the Park lives in a very uncomfortable space where sex is never something joyous, exciting, or expressive but where it is a commodity, a disgusting biological necessity with frightening and painful ramifications, and/or an unreachable, twisted curiosity. There is always a heavy dichotomous swing between the awkwardness of, in the case of Frances, having experienced nothing, or, as is the case with The Boy, having experienced too much. And while the film doesn’t decry healthy sexual freedom, it looks on in sadness at unhealthy sexual identities which creates emotional cripples without any alternatives or outlets.
With her downward-turned smile, librarian hair, and muted earth tones, Sandy Dennis’s Frances is as sharp and emotionless as a clock and it is next to impossible to imagine that Dennis was but 32 years old when the film was made. Only when she eats some pot-laced cookies that are gag-gifted to her by The Boy do we see her melt into a soft-focused thing of beauty, lifted into the ether by the tremendously gorgeous camerawork of Laszlo Kovacs. Like Sissy Spacek’s Pinky in Altman’s 1977 masterpiece 3 Women, Sandy Dennis’s Frances brilliantly transforms into another character in front of the audience’s eyes. As the scene slowly relaxes forward, we begin to sync with her and pick up on the sexual being that she clearly would love to be if situations and forces unknown hadn’t stifled her; a life robbed of its natural joy somewhere along the path, not terribly dissimilar to many an Altman heroine. So it is with little wonder that when disappointment strikes, Frances snaps back into her discomforting comfort zone. And, boy, does she snap back hard.
Dividing the film in a rather bold way is the way it splits its time between the controlled environment of Frances’s apartment and the exterior world. And as That Cold Day in the Park marches toward its conclusion and moves more and more away from the confines of Frances’s apartment, Altman really cuts loose with his signature style of messy sound design meant to give the audience the sensation of being a casual observer. For all the ink spilled about the following year’s M*A*S*H being the birth of the specifically aural thing we’d eventually describe as a large piece of making something “Altmanesque,” here stands an alternative Exhibit A. In That Cold Day in the Park, the technique is used not only as an engaging participatory device for the audience but also as an overwhelming sensory overload to Frances, exemplified in the scenes set in the very chatty waiting room of a gynecologist and in a bar where Frances pitifully attempts to negotiate the procurement of a prostitute for The Boy. In both moments, she is entirely out of her element, completely rudderless, and her anxiety is palpable.
Aided by Gillian Freeman’s beautifully delicate screenplay (based on a novel by Peter Miles), Robert Altman’s third time at bat is an astonishing and effective film that generally gets lost in the conversation regarding his greatest works. While it lacks the jolts of Images and it can’t conjure the deliriously impenetrable and mysterious gossamer of 3 Women, That Cold Day in the Park reflects an artist interested in the marginalized and the outcast; people who aren’t given much serious study, but who are indeed out there, doing their damndest, and putting their whole heart into it, regardless of the inevitable, tragic consequences.
(C) Copyright 2025, Patrick Crain
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