Ray Pride

A colleague teased me for my flip answer to what I like about "Maid in Manhattan": "Jennifer Lopez's cute little ears."

"I'm gonna be wondering about your aesthetics," she said, laughing. But I'll always concede I'm a sucker for movies that showcase effortless charm, even when the vehicle is flawed. While Wayne Wang doesn't do for Lopez what Steven Soderbergh did in "Out of Sight," the often-indie Hong Kong-born veteran still brings an unlikely combination of romance and working-class verisimilitude to what could have been just another "Pretty Woman" wannabe. Lopez is a chambermaid at a ritzy New York hotel (the Waldorf-Astoria under another name); a series of contrivances lead her into romance with dryly patrician politician Ralph Fiennes.

I ask Wang if Lopez has the stuff to do work beyond wish-fulfillment, class-empowerment fantasies. "I hope she takes some chances and does some really great roles. I think she's got the chops for it. That's where she needs to go, rather than just keep playing the tough that the studios want her to do. I loved [Jennifer in] 'Mi Familia,' 'Selena.' There's gotta be a great role for a Latin woman that gives her something substantial. For me, I'm also trying to get back to something that's really Asian. I'm having a hard time, I've been working on it for years, have a wonderful script, but I can't get financing." So what about your adaptation of David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day"? "I'm getting closer. That one's interesting. Oddly enough, with that book being so popular and David selling out across the country, I'm still having a hard time financing it. The film world is [playing it] very, very safe. This is a bad time for independents."

"Maid in Manhattan" was a big surprise for Wang. "I wanted to work with a big movie again. After `Center of the World,' I couldn't get arrested! The reviews astonished me. I learned more about the critics and all their hang-ups. In the middle of the big computer boom in Silicon Valley, I was in the middle of all these kids who were in more of a romantic comedy than this by five hundred times. They thought the whole world was at their fingertips, at the keyboard."

Ralph Fiennes, so often cast as dark and damaged, also seems like an unlikely choice. "He had a lot of trepidation. He says, `I don't know how to do a romantic comedy.' I said, `I don't either!' So that's why we get along." And Wang is off on one of his regularly scheduled disarming giggles. "We said, let's treat this as a drama, y'know. Let's not think about it as a romantic comedy, let's think about the characters, let's think about the situation, make the dialogue real and go from there. But he's actually very loose and good in a romantic comedy. He underestimates himself in that [regard]."

"Maid" has a gorgeously produced and lit hotel-room romantic consummation that's simultaneously luxe and almost comic in its extravagance. "I'd just come off `Center of the World,' and almost the whole film is in the bedroom. It's always artificial, with all these people hanging around. The jewelers who loaned us the jewelry were sitting right next to me, making sure it didn't get stolen! But somehow these actors block it out and get into it. Those are the hardest scenes, to sell the fantasy and sell the romanticism of it." It's an ultra-chaste scene, especially in contrast to Wang's previous endeavor. "The interesting thing was that we shot some pretty hot love scenes and they all got cut out. In the previews, the audience didn't want it. They wanted the fairytale. They just wanted them to fall in love and love each other but they didn't want to look at it! In the first cut we had, it was a really hot love scene. I liked it, but y'know, that's `Center of the World'!" He laughs.

There are a couple of jokes about Lopez's backside. How do you find that balance of humor and taste? Wang giggles again. "I decided to use just one." It's a centerpiece of the TV commercials, set in Central Park, with Lopez sitting down on a New York magazine cover with Fiennes' mug on it. She says, "I'm sorry. I'm sitting on your face." "At first I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure it would work until we put the whole thing together. I think the reason why it works is because the magazine was stuck to her ass, you saw a little piece of it on the wide shot when she got up. You could hear the audience go `Hoohoohoohoo!' waiting to see if it's going to damage her [ultra-expensive borrowed coat]. Those things are always such a crapshoot. But I'm glad that one worked out."

Does she mind? "She didn't seem to care. That particular one, she played into it straight-faced. But she does have, y'know, a good... whatever!" He giggles. "The better shot is when she comes down the stairs [in a party scene] in that dress that's almost transparent and it's a shot from the back. That's the great shot, you see. If you see the film again..." More boyish laughter.

"Maid in Manhattan" opens Friday.

(2002-12-12)

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