Heavy Traffic is a wild ride of a movie. It's not very accessible or intelligible but it's rather fascinating as one man's delving into his own history and imagination.
Doubtlessly a very personal movie. Sort of like 8 and a half if 8 and a half was made by a graffiti artist. A lurid and grotesque affair, itself like a piece of graffiti splattered on an inner city wall. It is deliberately unlovely in its caricature of urban life complete with racial stereotypes, italic mobsters and bizarre transsexuals.
There's not much plot beyond these episodes of life and that's the point. Gradually the film becomes more about two alienated individuals, a cool black prostitute and an unsullied Jewish Italian Cartoonist, transcending differences in ethnoreligious background to try and make something in this bleak world even if it means being as brutal as everyone else is. I feel the usage of stereotypic images of black people, gays, jews etc. Helps even a tolerant viewer break into the mindset of people at this place and time where the colour of your skin and whether you wore a cross, crucifix or a 6 pointed star meant everything about who you are.
There's a certain lyricism in the way the movie is handled; the way that one can try and find beauty of sorts even in the ugliest of back drops and that's what I like most about the movie; it's an artist genuinely putting a piece of themselves on the screen with less regard about how many people like it but who likes it. It's ambitious and stylized but strangely unpretentious about it since it does nothing in half measures where we meander from sordid realism to daliesque bizarrity with a kitsch twist.
The trailer was spot on: "it's funny, but it's not a comedy; it's animated but it's not a cartoon". That sums it up pretty well.
This didn't charm me the way some other of Bakshi's movies did but often a movie is an oblique view into the mind of the maker. Here we've had a chance to get more or less a full view.
