The Woman in Red (1984)

Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red arrives from 1984 with the confidence of a man who has directed himself before and sees no reason to stop. It is a sex farce of classical proportions, which is to say it concerns a San Francisco advertising executive who glimpses a woman in a red dress above a ventilation grate and spends eighty minutes trying to arrange an affair. The machinery is old and well-oiled. Wilder plays Teddy Pierce as a milquetoast, Charles Grodin and Joseph Bologna supply the idiot friends, and Kelly LeBrock supplies the dress. The film has no message, no moral, and no interest in acquiring either. Critics at the time called it light and unpretentious, and they meant it as praise.

This is a film that exists entirely outside the cultural currents we are asked to measure. The cast is uniformly white. The premise is heterosexual infidelity pursued by men and endured by women. Judith Ivey's Didi weeps at the television; Gilda Radner's Ms. Milner is photographed for mockery and dismissed as an old maid. The central visual event is a model's underwear, staged for the camera's pleasure. There is no racial commentary, no economic critique of the advertising trade, no environmental concern, no engagement with disability or neurodivergence, and no historical subject requiring revision. The film is not hostile to social consciousness. It has simply never heard of it.

What it does have is Stevie Wonder, who wrote "I Just Called to Say I Love You" and won an Academy Award for it, an honor that prompted an Academy investigation into whether the song predated the film. It did, more or less. The picture itself was adapted from the French comedy Pardon Mon Affaire, and it inspired a Turkish remake before the original even reached Turkish screens. A curious afterlife for a farce about a man on a ledge. We classify it accordingly: a relic of an earlier dispensation, unbothered, unenlightened, and entirely at peace.