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Crane and zoom lay out the stage between desert and road, a patch of trailer rust and cracked stucco and forlorn neon. A connection, inescapable, between the wounded blonde (Kim Basinger) and the stuntman-drifter (Sam Shepard) who smashes through her front door one long night. "Gutless and guilty" is her assessment of him, the lingering sting from the past liaison, "just a dirty old picture... it invades my head." Carnal torment has its pull, an ardent kiss becomes a knee to the balls. The old man (Harry Dean Stanton) knows the dark secret, the gentleman caller (Randy Quaid) hears about it mid-tequila gulp in a choice double take. "There's not a movie within a hundred miles that can match the story I'm gonna tell." Shepard's drama is Dust Bowl Strindberg, Robert Altman shapes it into a collection of languid, spectral zones in the rubble of the Western mystique. (The link to McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull's History Lesson is as crucial as to Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Streamers.) The dilapidated cowboy hears the pasodoble rattling in his mind as he rides a bronco and lassos a garbage can, his Wyoming dream withers in a motel room. "What's up there? Marlboro Man or somethin'?" Glassy reflections, honky-tonk commentary out of the pick-up radio, images not quite accompanying the narration. The Misfits and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf are among the modalities, One from the Heart and Love Streams are observed in the filming. A bovine nocturne, with expanded views of the blonde tyke on the playground swing and the jilted Countess with revolver and helmet of Eighties hair. "I wanna hear the male side of this thing!" The upshot is a harmonica in a conflagration, subsequently appreciated by Lynch and Roeg. Cinematography by Pierre Mignot.
--- Fernando F. Croce |