By NATASHA STOYNOFF --
NEW YORK -- At the beginning of a swingin' '70s party scene in The Ice Storm, each man tosses his car keys into a big, well-guarded glass bowl.
Insuring against drunk drivers, perhaps? Not quite.
By the party's end, each wife will have fished out an anonymous set of keys from that bowl and gone home with its respective driver, preferably NOT her own husband.
But, hey man, this is 1973. Lapels were wider then, and so were marital boundaries.
Still, just shooting this pivotal scene in which upper-class, suburban, married-with-children couples "swap wives" over highballs at one of those infamous "key parties" gave cast members the creeps.
"In the scene, we were like: `Hey, we're gonna get LAID,' " says actor Jamey Sheridan, "but every time the director said, `Cut!' everyone went, `Oh, GOD!' " the actor cringes, making gagging noises.
A quietly shocking film about the breaking apart of the nuclear family, The Ice Storm plops us into the eye of the storm -- that era's post-Watergate, post-war disillusionment -- and the drug of choice of some white, rich, and protected families in Connecticut -- sex.
"They were trying to grab whatever escape they could," says Sigourney Weaver, who adopted a Jane Fonda Klute look for the film. "They had sex to feel better, briefly ... but they were lost souls."
As sex isn't always about sex, on film or in real life, but often about the struggle for control, the who's and why's of this extinct key exchange sex spectacle is a bit blurry.
Key parties, says Sheridan, are the couples' way of trying to control an out-of-control time.
"It's a study of a moment when something in America's ability to trust is cracked, and it emanated from Nixon."
Also starring Joan Allen and Kevin Kline, the film, surpisingly, comes from Sense And Sensibility director Ang Lee.
Where Sense was about "good people who want to be bad," Allen points out, "these are people who are behaving very badly and nature comes along and slaps them on the wrist, saying, `You need to be good again!' "
Based on Rick Moody's scathing novel, published in 1994, director Lee describes Storm as "a period piece, a costume drama," with decadent decor (Lava lamps! Waterabeds! Love beads!) and dated sex games.
And like most "bad" people in movies, they are properly punished in Shakesperean proportions when the film ends in tragedy during a freak ice storm.
"It's justified retribution," Lee says of the sinners' sins.
Growing up in Taiwan, Lee calls his upbringing "more like The Brady Bunch." Then, moving to the U.S. in 1978 as the conservative Reagan era was about to emerge, he was too late to witness the key party scene for real.
"I started to ask around and finally found somebody who had actually gone to one, but he didn't do anything," he says.
`I NEVER HEARD OF IT'
Even the American cast is hard-pressed to remember such a pastime, or anybody who had taken part.
"I had never heard of it," says Allen, who screened Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and re-read The Feminine Mystique before filming began.
"But my sister, who is two years older, remembers that even people in our small community in the Midwest had done it."
"I had no idea that went on," says 17-year-old Christina Ricci, who completely missed the entire decade, and pored over '70s magazine ads and articles given to the cast by Lee.
"I was asking my mother about that, and she said, `Oh, God no! We didn't do anything like that!'
"I think it's disgusting," says the young actress. "It's kind of like grown-up spin the bottle, and I was never a fan of that game."
The youths in the film don't escape such sexual experimentation, and as one of the confused teens, Ricci's character does her own share, too.
But speaking as a teen of the '90s who must now deal with the aftermath of those before her, Ricci is angered at that generation's carelessness.
"All that free love and sex really did wonders for the AIDS epidemic," she says sarcastically.
Twenty-two-year-old co-star Tobey Maguire is just as turned off: "I watch the adults (in this film) and get really disturbed. They are constantly feeding themselves with more void."
Looking back as a college student of the time, "We took the sexual revolution for granted," explains Weaver.
"We thought we were the beginning of the age of Aquarius and that we could change the world and get away from the nincompoops that got us into Vietnam. We were gonna change all that."
But our innocence has been so damaged, say the cast, we may never regain it.
"This society is praying to be able to trust someone," says Sheridan. "Certainly anybody over 35 has been stung."
He cites our preoccupation with U.S. President Bill Clinton's alleged affair as a good example of this.
"We just want to catch any liar we can," says Sheridan.
All that free love came at a price, says the film. And when it was over, we were left in an icy, big chill.
"The '50s unravelled in the '70s," says Weaver, "and we're still coping with it."
THE STORM FILE
THE MUSIC: Dirty Love, by Frank Zappa. I Can't Read, by David Bowie.
THE BOOKS: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Betty Friedan and Human Sexual Response.
THE FASHIONS: Toe socks. Fringed vests. Ponchos. Don't laugh, it's all coming back.
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