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The point of departure is Wenders' Hammett, "a very literary high" is the objective. The Beat Fifties and the exterminating artist, the hard-boiled shamus a decade too late, Peter Weller at his most affectingly deadpan. He sprays roaches for a living but keeps running out of fuel, his bug powder goes into the veins of his wife (Judy Davis). Shoot the muse and enter the zone, the usual business of inspiration, gun into typewriter into beetle. Junkies, hepcats and monsters in the Casbah of the mind. "I suffer from... sporadic hallucinations." "Join the club." An obscene mutation of adaptation and biopic, David Cronenberg on William S. Burroughs wouldn't want it any other way. The expatriate is the spitting image of the dead missus, she shares local boys with her husband (Ian Holm) and writes erotic fiction in Arabic, the machine moans and writhes as she types heatedly. (The humping critter that materializes during the tryst is shooed away like a naughty pet.) Ringers for Kerouac and Ginsberg and the Bowles, black centipede meat on the plate and buggery in the birdcage, all part of "a certain unique reality principle." Robbe-Grillet holds formal sway throughout, and there's a dash of Duras for the tale of the talking asshole (a strict reading intercut with a nocturnal road intermittently illuminated by headlights). Belgian swish (Julian Sands) and bullish witch (Monique Mercure), a cigar-chomping Mabuse in the discredited physician (Roy Scheider). The droll clarity of the grotesque misses nothing, the Harvey rabbit turns up as a rather convivial alien with drippy antennae, "mugwump jism can't be beat." Creation and destruction and semiotics and viscera, the Cronenberg process laid bare. Gilliam in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has his own countercultural dragon to chase. With Joseph Scorsiani, Nicholas Campbell, Michael Zelniker, Robert A. Silverman, Yuval Daniel, John Friesen, and Sean McCann.
--- Fernando F. Croce |