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I Am a Camera, as Cocteau would have it, the opening POV prowl connects icepick and eyeball and rouses the heroine in her mirrored boudoir. (The story is John Carpenter's, in the same year he takes it into his own hands for the famous Halloween overture.) The controversial photographer (Faye Dunaway) specializes in sadistic chic, lingerie and blood and amazons pulling each other's hair in glossy compositions, her exhibition is curtailed by news of murder. Her vision fuses suddenly with the culprit's during the slayings, she illustrates her condition by placing herself with back to a recorder and pointing to the flickering video monitor (cp. De Palma's The Fury). The police lieutenant (Tommy Lee Jones) regards her as "the frustrated-voyeur type," scruffy chauffeur (Brad Dourif), swishy manager (René Auberjonois) and gigolo ex-husband (Raul Julia) supply a list of red herrings plus an avid snapshot of New York City at its most luxurious-pungent. "Whatever happened to beautiful?" The charged gaze, an Irvin Kershner theme (The Hoodlum Priest), mystery and responsibility of the imagemaker. A flurry of tracking and panning gives the sensation saturation of swanky nincompoops gawking at Helmut Newton provocations, the swift, zigzagging flow allows a glance of passersby amused at the glittering recreations of fashionable terror. Artistic minds, criminal minds, the shock of inspiration is a continuous element. The orderly tumult of a studio versus the vérité decay of trash-strewn streets, a close kinship to Schatzberg's Puzzle of a Downfall Child. Eventually the bloodthirsty blade assails the camera itself and cracks the lens. (It's up to the killer to issue a puritanical explanation, "a very moral point-of-view.") The template is Argento's (Deep Red), so is the riposte (Tenebrae). With Darlanne Fluegel, Lisa Taylor, Rose Gregorio, Frank Adonis, Meg Mundy, Michael Tucker, and Bill Boggs.
--- Fernando F. Croce |