“Don’t you sometimes wish you could just meet someone who’d carry you off and take care of you?” Susan Berlanger (Kristy McNichol) asks her friend Lisa (Kaki Hunter) in the opening moments of Just the Way You Are (1984). It’s a funny sentiment coming from a character so ambivalent about all the amorous attention she attracts wherever she goes.
Susan, a flautist about to embark on her first recital tour in Europe, is catnip to men. Her quick wit, adversarial posturing, dazzling smile and structurally complex hair even win admirers over the phone. Jack (Lance Guest of Please Mom, Don’t Hit Me), an answering service operator, is so smitten that he knocks on her door in a gorilla suit. He scampers away just as quickly after noticing her leg brace.
Sam Carpenter (Robert Carradine), a geeky stranger, approaches Susan at a bar. He enlists her to introduce him to Lisa but soon finds himself drawn to Susan, leg brace and all. She flirts back, pretending the elevator’s out of service so he’ll carry her upstairs. “That’s a nice perfume you’re wearing,” he tells her in the process. “It’s Polo by Ralph Lauren,” she replies, adding “I thought it said polio, that’s why I bought it.”
“Is that what it was, polio?” he asks. No, she explains, she contracted viral encephalitis at age nine. “But people think I’m talking about a Romanian tennis player when I say that, so I just say polio. It saves a lot of confusion.” Sam, gentle and awkward, pursues her, but she puts on the brakes when things turn physical. Her quasi-fiancé, Frank (Tim Daly), then arrives, and to my eternal sorrow, Sam is never heard from again. Afterward, she and Frank have an enlightening conversation over tea.
Frank: It’s OK. I realize that this is something that’s gonna happen from time to time. I mean, look, there are lots of married couples that have their little affairs, and it doesn’t really mean anything.
Susan: Love and friendship, that’s all that matters. Not sex, right?
Frank: So. If every now and then, you have to sleep with some guy—
Susan: Or if you do—
Frank: Or I do. It’ll be OK.
Susan: Just as long as it’s not the same fella, right?
Just the way you are (1984)
They realize a bit mournfully that it wouldn’t be a suitable bearding arrangement. Susan suggests that maybe his employer will “accept you just the way you are,” which gets to the heart of their shared predicament. Just the Way You Are features several sweet but slightly frustrating moments like that, where the germ of an idea seems ready to take flight, only to go nowhere. After poking fun at a movie theater usher that wants her seated rather than standing, leg brace gleaming, outside where others can see her, Susan takes off for Europe.
Impulsively, she decides to ditch her tour and play hooky in the French Alps. Inspired by a ski wear mannequin in a leg cast, she asks a doctor to recreate the look so she can “be like a lot of other people there.” He disapproves of the idea professionally, but nonetheless agrees to do it “with pleasure.” And with that, Susan arrives at her resort nursing what appears to be a temporary injury, and immediately hits the sack with a handsome professional skier (Patrick Cassidy).
Plot contrivances neatly provide her with a Lisa stand-in, Nicole (Catherine Salviat), a Parisian gallerist. They share a hotel room and become fast friends, conversing easily in English even though they initially required a translator. Through Nicole she meets François Rossignol (the charming André Dussollier), a dashing ski magnate and amputee. And then there’s hunky photographer Peter Nichols (Michael Ontkean), on assignment with his slalom skier girlfriend (Alexandra Paul).
Peter is flirtatious and, like Susan, not overly fond of commitment. Yet she beguiles him, as is her mysterious custom. “When you do what I do for a living, you get to see things other people don’t even notice,” he tells her. He thinks she’s hiding something and wants to know what it is. Having resolved not to let anyone in Paris in on her secret, she jokes that she’s a Russian spy. Their paths repeatedly cross, Susan seemingly unbothered that he’s a jerk to his rude girlfriend.
It is the curse of all movie commitment-phobes to inevitably find themselves wanting more, and when it happens to Susan and Peter she’s indignant. Calling Lisa long distance, she rants, “I just never planned on something like this happening. He seemed like the last guy in the world… Lisa, what am I going to do?” The simplest solution—coming clean about her leg—is the one she fears most. Nicole’s callous rejection of François after learning of his amputation only heightens her anxiety.
Why doesn’t Susan seek advice from François? “You can’t make people be more than they are,” he says of Nicole when Susan hopes for her redemption. Screenwriter Allan Burns (soon to write and direct Just Between Friends) makes the peculiar decision to keep her from confiding in him despite their many shared private moments. He also invites her to participate in the “gimp race,” a ski competition for those with broken limbs. Her very reluctant run down the slopes is one of the film’s most amusing scenes.
Just the Way You Are, directed with a light, playful touch by Édouard Molinaro (La Cage aux Folles), is a film of half-baked ideas. The disabled woman in search of acceptance pondering marriage to a closeted homosexual could’ve been its own movie. A photographer seeing Susan for who she really is, even as she hides her truth, has endless possibilities of its own. Susan’s poignant offense at Nicole’s dismissal of François could’ve sustained a deeper subplot. Burns, previously a Mary Tyler Moore Show scribe, goes for sitcom vignettes instead.
McNichol, like Moore, was adept at turning the world on with her smile. Her winning personality and comic timing appear in flashes in Just the Way You Are. But trouble lurked beneath the surface: She was struggling with debilitating health issues of her own. I think you get a sense of that more than once in her performance. And, from a distance of nearly 40 years, I think it’s fair to suggest her personal experiences add layers of complexity to the film. Just a few years later, she again sacrificed her acting career for her wellbeing, this time for good.
On a personal note, I don’t have a leg brace, but my body has been “different” since childhood due to disease and operations. As my peers moved into the wanting-to-remove-clothing portion of our adolescent years, I wanted to pile on more. I was well into my twenties before I trusted someone enough to embark on a relationship. That is probably why this imperfectly rendered tale of a young woman’s desire to be viewed on her own terms, and not through the prism of her physical abnormality, was surprisingly meaningful to me.
In Roger Ebert’s review, he suggests that if your body has been “different” since childhood you’ll have already made peace with it by your early twenties. I’m sure that sounded fine to him in theory, but in practice it’s hilariously untrue. His suggestion that McNichol’s character is unusually promiscuous was also odd. Susan sleeps with two guys in Europe. Michael Ontkean’s character, who sleeps with two women, is spared his judgment.
Streaming and DVD availability
Just the Way You Are is available on DVD and for streaming (rental or purchase).
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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