Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills

Classic cult director Paul Bartel solidified his reputation for working out taboo or theoretically shocking subject matter through the lens of stodgy bourgeois American culture in 1982’s Eating Raoul, which dealt with yuppies, swingers, and cannibalism. Falling somewhere between the extreme experimental camp Hollywood satire of the Kuchar Brothers, the anarchic nastiness of early John Waters, and the low-budget cheesiness of Roger Corman, Bartel’s Scenes from the Class Struggle locks its satirical gaze on perhaps the easiest target of all: the shallow nouveau riche in that bastion of superficial wealth and social snobbery, Beverly Hills. But here the raunchy sex comedy scenario Bartel mapped out from absurdist beginning to equally absurdist end is too contrived to hit the necessary satirical pay-dirt. Casting wise, however, the film is a cult director’s dream: an elegantly aging Clare Lipkin (Jacqueline Bisset) is a washed-up TV star who’s out to make a comeback after her husband (Paul Mazursky) dies in a kinky sex accident. And perhaps in a nod to supernatural-interactive comedies of old like Blithe Spirit and Ghost and Ms. Muir, the ghost of Clare’s late husband makes some strategic appearances throughout but without much influence on the plot. Clare’s next-door neighbor Lisabeth (Bartel regular Mary Woronov) is a new bachelorette who’s just split up with her diminutive millionaire husband (Wallace Shawn).  But these main characters aren’t the fulcrum of the 'action' in the film. It’s the respective manservants (one a chauffeur, the other a houseboy) of the two wealthy women who spark the madcap proceedings: they wager $5000 to see who can bed an employer first.  But when the two rich bachelorettes decide to have a gaggle of pretentious guests over, the amorous intentions of the two servants go awry, setting off an improbable chain reaction of partner-swapping sexual shenanigans. The trouble is, Bartel, in his lampooning of the living, breathing clichés of Beverly Hills, can’t really find a satirical mode of attack that avoids clichéd pitfalls himself. The cleverer-than-thou dialogue sounds too self-consciously written to be believable in a conversational context ('I’ve had more virgins than you’ve had crabs,' says one servant to his rival at one point). And, frankly, Bisset’s and Woronov’s characters don’t seem so horrible that we can sit back and approvingly observe their servants’ devious sexual machinations in the first place. And certainly, the film’s crude racial and sexual humor just hasn’t aged that well. Optional. (M. Sandlin).