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Ziggy Stardust was an uncanny pop concept not lost on Nicolas Roeg, who has David Bowie modulate it into a cosmic Great Gatsby burlesque. Landing in New Mexico from a drought-cracked planet, the visitor—chalk-skinned, ginger-headed, angular like a Giacometti—gulps down a cup of pond water and sets out to make his fortune. From $20 for a wedding ring at a gift shop to billions in a gizmo market is a hop, a skip and a jump, or so it seems to the hyper-acute visionary who watches sunlight leisurely reflected on skyscrapers then notices that his earthling companies have aged decades. The progression is from glam prophet to spent vampire (Citizen Kane is a clear model), along the way there are brushes with the chambermaid-concubine (Candy Clark) and the fallen scholar and coed-humper (Rip Torn) who introduces himself as "kind of a cliché, the disillusioned scientist." Upholding the droll tradition of British sci-fi, Roeg sets up all sorts of frameworks. There's a traveler's vision of American terrain, ecstatic and disoriented, a panorama of rockabilly and deserts and lakes spotted with hotels and trains, endless space where divergent urges grind and intertwine. There's a portrait of the capitalist ecosystem gone unbalanced, a satire of Pakula political thrillers. ("Take the wider view," muses Bernie Casey's corporate honcho.) And there's a wild existential comedy about how sex and Kabuki are surprisingly similar, about identity and perception (Bowie's grin turns into a grimace before a wall of TV screens: "Get out of my head!") and not knowing who your lover really is until you're in bed next to a gooey humanoid. I Married a Monster from Outer Space by way of Resnais (plus a soupçon of Corman's Not of This Earth), an experiment of intergalactic irony and inner disconnection, a spectacular work of telescopes and microscopes. Cinematography by Anthony Richmond. With Buck Henry, Jackson D. Kane, and Tony Mascia.
--- Fernando F. Croce |