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Eros and Thana(tos) in Manhattan. The mute Garment District caterpillar (Zoë Lund) is patted on the head by her lecherous boss and shrinks from the bawdy displays that tickle her colleagues. She's raped in a back alley, at home awaits a second intruder: "This oughta make you talk," he slobbers as he invades her, upon which the girl slays with a clothes iron. The psyche unmoors, the chrysalis cracks—the wraith that emerges favors black stockings and gory lipstick, seizes her assailant's revolver and goes hunting. "I just wish they would leave me alone," she once wrote of men, now she baits them as a porcelain-skin executioner, photographers and pimps and pashas all fall in the luxuriating rampage. Abel Ferrara at once acknowledges Repulsion with the bludgeoned corpse in the bathtub, though his main object of derangement is Johnny Belinda, sadistic melodrama magnified and complicated by grindhouse nastiness. His New York is warty and garbage-strewn, yet it is also a metropolis of a thousand vibrant Basquiat figures, where the only way to interrupt a barfly's brilliantly peculiar monologue ("We made love all over the house... We'd start in the living room and end up in the bathroom... Then I went out to the kitchen and strangled her cat") is to put a gun to his head. A pungent expressionism of drains regurgitating shredded flesh, limbs in duffel bags, saxophones wailing into the night. Above all, Lund's zonked-out grace as her Thana wraps up the tale's gender conflicts in a nun costume and unleashes a slow-mo apocalypse. (She expires at a masquerade between a male partygoer in bridal drag and a female coworker wielding a phallic knife, the word "sister" on her lips.) A whiff of Umberto D. turns up in the final shot, a lone speck of light in the Ferrara inferno. With Albert Sinkys, Helen McGara, Darlene Stuto, Nike Zachmanoglou, Jack Thibeau, and Editta Sherman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |