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"A camera is a sublimation of the gun," says Sontag in a variation of a famous Cocteau epigram, the opening titles glide across a revolver's barrel and peep into its chamber in a metallic striptease. Gens d'armes, among them the rookie (Jamie Lee Curtis) who enjoys the force that comes with the uniform. ("I like to slam people's heads up against walls" is her half-joking answer when asked by an unwanted suitor why she became a cop.) Her first case is a supermarket stickup that leads to her suspension when the gun of the robber she kills is lost in the tumult, pocketed by a commodities trader (Ron Silver). The vision of a policewoman uncorks his mania, soon he's courting her with champagne dinners and helicopter rides while carving her name on the bullets of his murderous spree. To pledge his love is to declare himself as her dark half: "You would do what I do if you knew yourself better." Brutality, its allure and damage, both receive Kathryn Bigelow's sleek delirium. The introductory feint has the heroine tackling a domestic situation in a training simulation, later on she handcuffs Dad (Philip Bosco) for battering Mom (Louise Fletcher) in a characteristically barbed divide of empowerment and victimization. Curtis might be the filmmaker herself melding vulnerability and fury within masculine circles, Silver meanwhile is practically a yuppie werewolf—barking in the stock-market pit, anointing himself with a slain hooker's blood, removing lead from his own flesh while in the next room the object of his obsession sleeps with a detective named Mann (Clancy Brown). "I mean... death is the greatest kick of all." Werker's He Walked by Night figures in the feverish climax, the coda (unsettled protagonist, spent pistol) is a signature Bigelow abstraction of genre and gender. With Elizabeth Peña, Richard Jenkins, Kevin Dunn, Matt Craven, and Tom Sizemore.
--- Fernando F. Croce |