Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I guess since "The Odd Couple" was already taken as a title, Robert Altman decided "A Perfect Couple" instead. This film seems about 10 years behind the times in its story of a young woman (Marta Heflin) involved with a seemingly hippie "Up With People!" type singing group who meets the portly Paul Dooley and their strange encounters while dealing with the others' eccentric groups and family and just trying to find time to learn about each other. Another missed opportunity for a potentially challenging emotional film about less than perfect people seeking happiness in a relationship, "A Perfect Couple" is just bizarre. Heflin, who is a cross between Shelley Duvall (an Altman regular), Olive Oyl (whom Duvall would play the following year) and Laraine Newman, isn't unattractive, but her character really isn't all that interesting. Dooley, too, has some issues. While I don't mind a film focusing on the usual supporting characters trying to be a leading player rather than a character type, I just never found myself interested in their situations, mainly because they really seem to be too distant as people to really care about.As far as the actors, I did like the fact that the majority of the cast is made up with unknowns. Of the cast, I only knew Dooley (of "Breaking Away" fame), Henry Gibson, Dimytra Arlyss and Dennis Franz; The rest of them to me were totally unfamiliar, so I did feel like I was watching something fresh on that perspective. Of those unknowns, Titos Vandis stood out as Dooley's tyrannical papa, and after researching his credits, I will certainly look for him in his other work. Two scenes that will probably remain in my memory are where Dooley and Heflin are trying to be alone but are interrupted, first by Vandis and his disapproving family, and later in a hotel room by Heflin's freaky pals. For connoisseurs of Altman's work, this will probably be a curio, but for others, it might be a good idea to know the type of film you are getting yourself into.

Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin play a most decidedly IMperfect couple in Robert Altman's version of a romantic comedy. His claim at the time (justified) is that Hollywood had always allowed only beautiful people to fall in love, so he wanted to make a romance with a couple of ordinary folk. He succeeded when he found the paunchy Dooley and the distractingly skinny (nearly anorexic) Heflin for his leads, but the film itself is not much of a success. This came out during Altman's "experimental" period, meaning he threw together some disparate elements and hoped for the best. Actually, it's quite accessible for Altman, considering "Quintet" came out in the same year, and it's one of his least Altman-like projects. Unfortunately, it's those very qualities that also make it one of his least interesting and ugliest from a purely visual standpoint.The film does boast some good if dated music though, performed by the real-life band Keepin' Em Off the Streets, led by Ted Neely, most known for playing the role of Jesus in the film version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" (and whom I saw perform the role on stage in a touring version).Grade: C

This is unlike any Altman movie I have ever encountered. No snarkiness, no clever dialogue, no overlapping story lines. This is just a nice, simple love story. Paul Dooley is nice as a middle aged man still controlled by his father. Marta Heflin was a harder character to pin down. Maybe it was because I was only concentrating on her excessive thinness (her next role cast her as a concentration camp victim, if that gives you some idea), but I couldn't get a read on her at all. Her face was fairly blank, but her voice was outstanding! She belongs to a communal singing group led by the insanely talented, and so sexy, Ted Neely! We see many of the bands (Keepin Em off the Streets) songs performed in their entirety, and it is fantastic! I will be scouring the internet for copies of their music! Overall, sweet love story,with some nice sibling relations thrown in, but the reason I will keep coming back is the music!

"A Perfect Couple" comes from a period when Altman was trying to make films through his own Lion's Gate company with financial backing from Fox (courtesy of Alan Ladd, Jr.). Working, in the main, with very slender budgets, he seems to have been trying to do work that could break even financially even when the films didn't expand much beyond the small audiences that most of his movies had typically attracted. In the end, the effort failed. He was rapidly losing the support of even critics who had long been sympathetic, and the audience for small, experimental films was drying up.Most of the films from the Lion's Gate/Fox period have a flimsy undeveloped quality to them. His work from M*A*S*H to Nashville had all started from someone else's script even though most of those films would do little more than retain the basic structural elements, the rest being altered/improvised during rehearsal and actual shooting. But he had something to work off, react to (or against) and build from. By the time of "A Perfect Couple," Altman's name was showing up as screenwriter (usually in collaboration with someone from a previous film) which is a fair indication that these movies started shooting with little or no script at all, just an idea, some characters, and some sense of where it all should go. The financing was there, and he had to take advantage of it, hoping to pull something off on the spur of the moment. It worked with "3 Women," but he was less successful here and in "Quintet." Paul Dooley is a middle-aged divorced man living at home where his life is ruled by his rich father (since they're Greeks, his father is naturally played by Titos Vandis). Marta Heflin is a shy aimless young woman who's a member of a rock band and lives with them all in a kind of self-contained community in a downtown L.A. loft. They meet through a computer dating service, come together, fall out with each other, come together again, and fall out. Most of the film deals with their efforts to kindle a romance in spite of the obstacles placed in their way by the respective family groups each belongs to.Altman seems to have intended a culture clash comedy, and, in some ways, this film grew out of "A Wedding" in which Dooley and Heflin both had roles, and where Altman set two dissimilar families against one another with fair results. Here, though, the cultures that clash are both sketched out so quickly, and with such broad strokes, that "A Perfect Couple" could play as self-parody, if self-parody were so obviously not intended. Dooley makes the best of it. He's able to find (or create) funny moments, but they're just moments. There's not enough here for them to integrate into any kind of whole. Heflin is less successful, but then her character is, in general, so passive that there's not much character to play.Not much develops here because so much time is given over to the rock band (Keepin Em Off the Streets) that Heflin belongs to. Every time the film starts going somewhere, we get another song that's played out to full length (and there are 11 of them in the movie). The band was formed by Altman cohort (and "Perfect Couple" co-screenwriter) Allan Nicholls, and "A Perfect Couple" seems to exist as much to showcase the band as to tell the film's story. Maybe the thought was that if the band (or any of its songs) hit, that would be enough to propel the movie to some kind of success.In the end, the movie was dismissed by most as a light curiosity, and it went nowhere. If it's interesting, it's interesting as an experiment on Altman's part to exist in the commercial mainstream making quick, cheap movies that wouldn't need to bring in large audiences to succeed. But Fox, after a management shake-up, lost interest in Altman, and he lost their financial backing before Lion's Gate was able to make anything that succeeded (even on Altman's terms). Altman, for his part, would spend most of the '80's making even smaller, less expensive films in an effort to keep his hand in.