One from the Heart is remembered today, if it is remembered at all, for its visual and even aural style. Shot entirely on Zoetrope soundstages which recreated the Las Vegas strip and its environs, the film has an artificial look throughout. This overkill in look, colour, texture and design ensures the film is far removed from conventional realism so much so that most critics felt it an example of burning style over content. Thus, the biggest problem with the film is that while it is fascinating on a technical, Expressionistic level, it is un-involving and overacted as a personal character drama. There is much to admire about the film, but it is all flash and the story of human dissatisfaction and longing whilst present is secondary, although this theme would be more fully explored in Coppola’s subsequent film of The Outsiders. One From the Heart seeks to explore the interpersonal barriers to love and satisfaction, the limits of every person as they must face a point of personal crisis but as there is nothing in this content that is new, only the way in which it is presented, the enterprise is simply heartless manufacture. Coppola’s use of a mobile camera to explore every aspect of the soundstage spaces (moving through glass from a street into a store window) is a perfect demonstration of the freedom of the camera in film form and yet every move is obviously deliberate and planned – Coppola spent much time on storyboards and choreographing every shot.
One From the Heart is about the desires of frustrated and dissatisfied people to “make things happen” to prevent the horror of stagnation – about the drive for invention. People’s quiet emotional longing can only be contained so much before they start to stray, seeking fulfilment outside of their established emotional partnership. Curiously, this is played for comedy and the tonal mix, whilst complex and admirable as an aesthetic choice, is finally distancing and un-involving. What it does capture is a bluesy, melancholic, almost bittersweet feeling amidst the lurid neon of life on the poorer outskirts of Vegas. It looks and feels like a period movie, a forties film in lush colour as if Coppola wanted to explode it. Yet as narrative it is structured quite routinely in three acts, charting the couple’s break-up, their explorations outside their relationship, and the move to possible reconciliation. These characters, Garr especially, want to live Romantic dreams, hence the film takes on the quality of a musical at times. Despite being full of offbeat touches, the movie is never as involving as it wants to be. It is an achievement on an aesthetic level but even there technology has eclipsed it. One really wishes that this film were better than it is but alas, One from the Heart fails to leave much of an impression despite its stylistic finesse and as a film about the personal dilemmas of quiet dreamers it is an intriguing melodramatic disappointment. read more