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"Cinéma du look" assoluto—the moon isn't a moon but a spotlight, a puddle of blood is first and foremost a splash of crimson. Such planes of artifice comprise Jean-Jacques Beineix's fetishized gambit, with eyes not on New York, New York or One from the Heart but on the very early Sternberg, The Salvation Hunters, even. As the forlorn Marseilles stevedore obsessed with finding his sister's ravisher and murderer, Gérard Depardieu dons Stanley Kowalskian shirts and crunches his way through blocks of solid ice. His family includes a twitchy scavenging brother (Dominique Pinon) and a bibulous father (Gabriel Monnet) henpecked by a rotund diva (Bertice Reading), meanwhile his tantrum-throwing mistress (Victoria Abril) straddles a swing and slams into the camera, spread-legged. Against this photogenic squalor is Nastassja Kinski, filmed like a goddess in a purring scarlet convertible under a billboard carrying the filmmaker's invitation: "Try another world." "You came here for a ride. Be careful." The transmuting of David Goodis' American tough-guyisms into Gallic swooning in cavernous Cinecittà soundstages is a sublime move or possibly a forehead-smacking one, either way it feels right for Beineix's set of lustrous superfices. The iron leviathan at the dock and the cathedral on the edge of the chasm are just two of the visions of low and high delirium, plus the nocturnal waterfront lit up by the couple's emotional fireworks (dilated later by Leos Carax) and the atomized hues of headlights as a car barrels toward disaster. "Un mauvais rêve," an elongated trance. It's been called obnoxious and wasteful by reviewers blind to the cardboard Pierrot cutout, to the violin wrapped in newspapers, to the romantic folly voiced plaintively by Depardieu: "Faith is not a matter of size." Cinematography by Philippe Rousselot. With Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Bernard Farcy, Milena Vukotic, and Anne-Marie Coffinet.
--- Fernando F. Croce |