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"White on white translucent black capes," as the song goes, the Eighties like their aestheticism undead. Immemorial Eurotrash, the blonde bloodsucker (Catherine Deneuve) has Egyptian roots (cf. Russell's The Lair of the White Worm), her latest haunt is a posh Manhattan mausoleum. (The nightclub overture states the driving sense of image first and foremost: smoke and leather and metallic blues, the thumping rhythm finally introduces splashes of red.) Eternity as lure and curse, painfully discovered by the most recent paramour (David Bowie) when the weight of centuries is suddenly felt and he morphs from Thin White Duke to Little Big Man. (Beneath mounds of latex wrinkles, Bowie manages to conduct a delicate minuet of famished sorrow.) His New World replacement is the scientist (Susan Sarandon) who just happens to have a new book on "mankind's flirtation with immortality." Tony Scott in his feature debut is well aware of Kümel's Daughters of Darkness, and even more aware of the new decade's appetite for consumable lushness and surface stimuli, thus a treatise on flesh and flash. The castle has an incinerator in the cellar and in the attic former lovers rotting in caskets, glass cages at the clinic (the doomed beau grows sunken in the waiting room while a research monkey disintegrates into dust) register the Roeg mystery of editing. Spilled sherry inaugurates the Sapphic twirl and a close-up of a bleeding steak marks its conclusion, in between there are billowing curtains and elongating lenses set to Delibes' Lakmé. ("Sounds like a love song," naturally Scott reuses it for an underworld showdown in True Romance.) The ultimate jape is that the cinematic sheen cracks like the vampiric queen, behind the gloss lies a screaming skull in smudged slow-mo. Cinematography by Stephen Goldblatt. With Cliff DeYoung, Beth Ehlers, Dan Hedaya, Rufus Collins, and Ann Magnuson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |