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The revenant's song, "why you forgettin', baby?" She appears after "4,380 days" in jail, puffing on cigarettes and blurting out hostilities, Geraldine Chaplin in a coiled and fluid tour de force. Uneasy romance at home with the super (Moses Gunn), lingering suspicion at work with her boss (Jeff Goldblum) and manager (Alfre Woodard). Hardhat (Anthony Perkins) and wife (Berry Berenson) are the main targets as her stalking escalates from phone calls to mauled gardens to home invasions. "Honey, don't be polite with freaks." A shared past emerges, Alan Rudolph shapes it as an unsettled welter of love and pain, a wounded thriller both flowing and claustrophobic. Suburban labyrinths stripped down to their skeletons in construction sites, earthquakes great and small. Mallarmé by way of Repulsion, "lorsque je couche seul." (The camera glides from flickering TV set over sleeping figure to barred window suddenly suffused with ominous light.) Mannequins wear blindfolds and handcuffs but the heroine will not be posed, ready to terrorize a rival in a kitchen or stab a lout with a pencil. Rudolph's expressive artifice peers through the naturalistic veneer (vertical wooden beams dissolve to martini glass-shaped neon), his soundscape is in full swing—the whoosh of off-screen airplanes, memory's metallic pounding, a complete blues set by Alberta Hunter. Background chatter reigns via news reports, "repression and not depression is primarily responsible for violent crimes," cf. Altman's That Cold Day in the Park. The reunion remarries Chaplin and Perkins in angular rawness, proceeding from tense police station to giddy cocktail lounge to the junction of fresh start and dead end. Question of changed locks in the void, "you wanna keep people out or you wanna stay in?" Cassavetes in Love Streams pushes the analysis as far as it can go. Cinematography by Tak Fujimoto. With Tim Thomerson, Marilyn Coleman, Jeffrey S. Perry, Alan Autry, and Dennis Franz.
--- Fernando F. Croce |