Kathryn Bigelow's latest film Strange Days provides an explosive start for this year's LFF. Lizzie Francke reports on the director's most ambitious and expensive work to date
With Strange Days, a glistening, brainstorming techno-noir set in a ragged and race-torn Los Angeles on the eve of the millennium, director Kathryn Bigelow, one of the most cinematically muscular directors working in Hollywood, unleashes her biggest punch yet. From the seamless, adrenalin-pumping opening to the swooning finale, it demonstrates Bigelow's extraordinary ability, as she makes every inch of the widescreen work, and then some. It is a brilliant, provocative start to this year's London Film Festival.
It will fire frantic debate long over the festival is over, not least because the film, among many other things, is about the disturbingly addictive perils - and euphoric pleasures - of cinema itself. Indeed, Bigelow's career has been marked by an unfaltering obsession with, and interrogation of, Hollywood's cinematic past, with her previous films all taking recognizable genres and twisting and turning them inside out. It has made for an explosive body of work.
Surely it is only Bigelow who could put a contemporary spin on the surf movie as she did with the wet and wild Point Break (1990). Meanwhile her 1981 debut feature The Loveless (co-directed with Monty Montgomery, now producing Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady) was a sublime take on such 1950s biker movies as The Wild One. Willem Dafoe made his movie debut as a slick sex god zipped up and roaring in black leather in this savvy essay on film and fetishism with a scorching rockabilly soundtrack by Robert Gordon. In Near Dark (1987), she staked her claim to the vampire movie, setting her tale of the marauding undead in the sun-scarred landscape of the American Midwest farmlands. An everyday tale of extraordinary blood-lusting folk, it traded in the familiar accessories of the Gothic mythology; the tell-tale fangs were replaced by spiky spurs.
The police came under scrutiny in her next film Blue Steel (1989) in which Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop who unwittingly becomes the lust object of a psychotic commodities trader in an equally psychotic Manhattan. With an arresting opening credit sequence in which the camera caresses the shiny and sleek sculptured planes of a .38 Smith and Wesson, the film was a persuasive meditation on the destructive seduction of gun power.
As with the rest of her work, Blue Steel demonstrates Bigelow's painterly eye for detail. For her the screen is a canvas to be worked in light. Unsurprisingly, she started out as a painter, first studying at the San Francisco Art Institute before attending the Whitney Museum Study Program in New York in 1972 where she was taught by the likes of Susan Sontag, Richard Serra and Robert Rauschenberg. Later, at the Columbia Film School, her teachers included Oscar-winning director Milos Forman and British theorist and filmmaker Peter Wollen, whom she has acknowledged as a particular influence. Rather than follow an avant-garde path, however, Bigelow has always been concerned to give her ideas a high-concept, mainstream gloss.
Strange Days is her most ambitious and her most expensive work to date. It is co-produced by James (Terminator) Cameron, who also wrote the screenplay with former Time film critic Jay Cocks (whose credits include Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and The Last Temptation of Christ). According to Cameron, casting posed a problem during the film's lengthy pre-production phase: “To be honest, a lot of the actors were a little scared of the script,” he noted.
As Lenny Nero, the troubled and sleazy ex-cop turned black market trader in other people's dreams, Fiennes has notched up another great role to follow his success in Schindler's List and Quiz Show. Meanwhile, as his diamond-hard best friend Mace, Angela Bassett, so brilliant as Tina Turner in What's Love Got To Do With It, proves her calibre once again. Indeed the adamantine Mace might well be Bigelow's alter ego, toughing it out in a distressed world, and offering what is ultimately a morally very clear vision amid the neon chaos.
LIZZIE FRANCKE
Prod co: Lightstorm Entertainment
Prods: James Cameron, Steven-Charles Jaffe
Dir: Kathryn Bigelow
Scr: James Cameron, Jay Cocks
Ph: Matthew F Leonetti, ASC
Ed: Howard Smith, ACE
Prod des: Lilly Kilvert
Costume des: Ellen Mirojnick
Special visual effects: Digital Domain
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Vincent D'Onofrio, Michael Wincott
Running time: 139 mins
UK distributor: UIP
Screening sponsored by the Evening Standard
[Home ] [Content ] [The Sponsors ] [The Team ] [Comments ] [Help ]
