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The performer's condition, his doppelgängers and simulacra, unexpectedly related to Bergman's The Magician. "What are you, some kind of Method actor?" Real claustrophobia in the ersatz cemetery, a bad day for the struggling schmuck (Craig Wasson) who loses his role as a punk vampire and then his girlfriend and home. He lands in the comically luxurious Hollywood Hills pad courtesy of a fellow thespian (Gregg Henry), it comes equipped with telescope and slinky neighbor with striptease routine (Deborah Shelton). The other pawns are the purse-snatcher with rubbery makeup, and the raunchy starlet (Melanie Griffith) who hasn't seen Vertigo. "I mean, you're my only witness to this murder, and you're a peeper." The surfaces that excite and the dangers of looking behind them, thus Brian De Palma's magnificently lurid autopsy of the Eighties pop tease. The blank hero who likes to watch is left with the slain muse's panties in his pocket, his "blood brother" wields an oversized driller between his legs, grisly slaughter in the land of artifice is an elaborate production of its own. Tati up and down the Beverly Hills mall and from long-shot to close-up at the beach, a spiraling pan set against a process shot and Pino Donaggio's slurpy score adds to the hilarity. Tinseltown and Pornoland, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" video filmed à la Phantom of the Paradise announces the overlap, "this is Body Talk, not Last Tango." The acting lesson scarcely forgotten ("feel-personalize-act," reads the blackboard), the simple matter of the voyeur finally wrestling the mise en scène away from the villain—De Palma brings it all together to a freshly dug grave by the side of the reservoir. "You ruined my surprise ending!" A marvelous joke on critics (cf. Verhoeven's The Fourth Man), all the way down the closing credits. Cinematography by Stephen H. Burum. With Guy Boyd, Dennis Franz, David Haskell, and Barbara Crampton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |