Baby It's You (film)
| Baby It's You | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | John Sayles |
| Produced by |
Griffin Dunne Amy Robinson |
| Screenplay by | John Sayles |
| Story by | Amy Robinson |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Todd Kasow |
| Cinematography | Michael Ballhaus |
| Edited by | Sonya Polonsky |
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Production
company |
Double Play
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| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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105 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3,000,000 |
| Box office | $1,867,792 |
Baby It's You is a 1983 American film written and directed by John Sayles. It stars Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano.
The film is about a romance between an upper middle class Jewish girl named Jill Rosen (Arquette), who is bound for Sarah Lawrence College, and a blue-collar Italian boy nicknamed the Sheik (Spano) in late 1966 New Jersey, who aspires to follow in Frank Sinatra's footsteps.
The movie follows their high school experiences during their romance: Jill's success in high school acting productions, Jill's rebuffing of Sheik's sexual advances, Sheik's one-night stand with a sexually active friend of Jill's and a subsequent suicide attempt by that friend.
Eventually, Sheik is expelled from school, and after an attempted robbery and subsequent pursuit by local police, Sheik goes to Miami, Florida, while Jill subsequently leaves for her first year at Sarah Lawrence in the fall of 1967. At one point in her first year, Jill visits Sheik in Florida, and although she sees clearly how little he has going for him (he has found work in a nightclub washing dishes and, on weekends, lipsynching to Frank Sinatra recordings), she has sex with him. In the moments before they undress, their conversation turns to his odd nickname, which he had not explained to Jill when they dated in high school. "Sheik" is a brand of condoms, he explains--"like Trojans."
Some time after Jill returns to college, Sheik arrives at work to find that he has been unceremoniously replaced by a real singer, albeit one with no great talent. This humiliation makes Sheik self-aware of his almost non-existent opportunities for career success in any endeavor, and in response, he steals a car and makes the long drive from Miami to New York, propelled by the romantic notion of reuniting with Jill.
Jill's college experience has not been easy or happy: she has not met with the acting or social success she had in high school. Yet, the act of consummating her desire for Sheik has led her to realize that she does not love him, for having had sex with him has moved her past the point of romantic and sexual wonder, and left her seeing that they inhabit different social worlds. When Sheik arrives at Sarah Lawrence and does not find Jill, he violently trashes her room and waits for her return. When she does and he declares his love for her, she tells him that she does not love him. Sheik briefly resists her response and then, in a moment of quiet dignity, accepts it. Jill then reaches out to Sheik, and asks him as a favor--for them both, in a sense--if he will take her to a college dance, for which she has otherwise been unable to find a date. The movie ends with this dance, and this final scene also registers the quick change of pace in popular culture in the mid-1960s. In the midst of the dance, either Jill or Sheik (the film does not identify which one) requests that the band, incongruously, perform "Strangers in the Night", the Sinatra hit that had been a key part of their high school romance. The film ends with them looking into each other's eyes and slow-dancing.
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