|
End of the Sixties, not a liberating orgasm but a flaccid fix. "Mama, look at where I am today / Not bad, what do you say?" It zooms back from a pimply posterior to introduce the drained hustler (Joe Dallesandro), the go-go bunny (Geri Miller) on her knees can't get a rise out of him, only the next hit of heroin keeps him going—addiction has replaced his genial vitality from Flesh with slurring detachment. (The earlier film's bleary sunniness gives way to sallow winter light.) The tour of Lower East Side dregs turns his bare glassiness into a trampoline for a veritable flea circus of kooks and posers, the camera slipping in and out of focus as one improviser after another seizes the screen. The bratty acidhead (Andrea Feldman) steps out of silhouette and lets loose with a symphony of singsong squawks: "I wanna see you shoot up! I mean, God, I can't get any LSD! By the way, do you have any LSD? I need LSD!" The bourgeois debutante (Jane Forth) welcomes him mid-burglary with bathtub water and shaving cream, her nattering is just the accompaniment for a heroin injection, from close-ups of veins and needles to overhead views of the ensuing overdose. "Oh, you're not liberal-minded at all!" The endless pursuit of highs, the ubiquity and torpor of sex, the Paul Morrissey comedy of grungy humanism. Its raging heart is Holly Woodlawn's tour de force as Joe's scrounging flat-mate, who imagines a family home and paws a high-schooler with the same Magnani intensity. (Her frizzy-haloed monologue is worth ten one-woman shows, her frenzy at having to replace a zonked-out lover with a beer bottle is one of the decade's great desolating passages.) The punchline is that sometimes dignity is a pair of old shoes, as Chaplin would say. With Michael Sklar, Bruce Pecheur, and Diane Podel.
--- Fernando F. Croce |