Splendor (1999)

After a decade of gorgeous nihilism, Araki made a sunny little rom-com where a girl keeps both boyfriends and nobody has to die for wanting.

This is Araki in full screwball mode, a giddy 30s throwback that plays like a very sexy reworking of Jules et Jim, and it’s delightfully horny, especially up front. The morning-after scene in the first act alone earns the ticket. Veronica meets a sensitive rock critic and a himbo drummer on the same Halloween night, can’t choose, and just takes both. What I loved most is how unbothered it is. It’s female-gaze to the bone, her desire is the engine, and Araki refuses to punish anyone for it, staying neutral toward the arrangement, no jealousy, no rupture, no moral. Nobody bleeds for pleasure here. After the neon body count of his teen films, that mercy reads like a stance.

And god, it’s beautiful. This is peak Araki, the color stunning and genuinely innovative, candy light and adorable outfits and a frame that glows, exactly the look he’d lose by the time he got to the flat fluorescent I Want Your Sex almost thirty years later. The dialogue, on the other hand, is not good, all campy-porno stilt, but that’s the mode, and half the fun is watching him shove at what a movie in ‘99 could get away with. He has never once tried to be respectable, thank god.

I owe Zed an apology. He walks in looking like the dumbest man alive and turns out to be the sweet, dopey heart of the entire thing. Keeslar steals every scene he’s in, and I fell for him exactly the way the movie wanted me to.

Where it loses me is the back half. You have a perfectly good movie about three people working out how to actually live together, and then Araki bolts a second movie onto it about a rich suitor versus the two broke ones. Ernest, the wealthy TV director, is built to be flat and faintly creepy, a guy who looks great on paper and curdles in the room, and that part lands, he gave me the genuine ick. But it’s a hat on a hat. The triad was already the story. Stacking money-versus-love on top left the third act cold, and worse, it crowds out the stuff I actually wanted, the messy work of three people sharing a bed and a life. Araki keeps it so frictionless and jealousy-free that I never got the real interpersonal struggle I came for. I’ll take what I can get, but I wanted more.

And Veronica is hard to love. She’s twenty-three and acts every day of it, making terrible calls and being a pretty rotten girlfriend the whole way through. I get it, she’s the engine of the melodrama, and a woman gets to be as messy as any Araki boy. But by the end I’d swung all the way over to the boyfriends. Abel and Zed are two sweet idiots who adored her, and they deserved better than what she put them through. Which might be the most romantic thing a threesome movie ever accidentally made me feel. Not who she should pick. That both of them should have run.

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