Mascara

An incestuous brother-sister duo! A psychotic killer who stalks transsexuals! An underground S&M club called Mister Butterfly! An opera gown with a fluorescent red heart! In its irresistible mix of outre artiness and commercial sleaze, Mascara plays as if Werner Schroeter had set out to direct an erotic thriller in the style of Joe Eszterhas.

Unthinkable in any normal universe, but Mascara is most defiantly NOT a normal film. A box-office catastrophe on its release, and still barely known outside a small clique of twisted souls, this is a cult movie waiting to happen. As deliciously warped as anything by Almodovar or John Waters, it's all the more campily compelling for being played with a straight face.

In a queer inversion of the Orpheus myth, it is Woman (a smoulderingly beautiful Charlotte Rampling) who inhabits a sunlit above-ground world of music, art and 'healthy' sexuality. (All three summed up by her affair with a hunky opera designer, Derek de Lint.) It is Man (Michael Sarrazin as her deranged sibling) who wallows in a subterranean sexual Hell of his own making.

Brief but surprisingly graphic shots treat us to leather bondage gear, chain-mail masks and the scariest Tina Turner drag act you are ever likely to see. The subtle androgyny of Rampling's persona becomes an eerie reflection of the real-life transsexuals (Berlin cabaret legend Romy Haag and Italian beauty Ewa Robins) who round out the film's cast.

And to make it that wee bit more perverse, the lurid goings-on are set to some serenely lyrical opera excerpts by Gluck, Bellini and Strauss. You'll either adore or loathe Mascara - there's no middle ground - but guaranteed you've never seen anything quite like it.

Look, I'm not suggesting Mascara is an even vaguely good film, but... who cares, it's a classic sample of Eurotrash culture. Another masterpiece from the "quality" merchants at Cannon film, I'm just surprised it hasn't found a solid cult audience in the midnight movie circuit or 1980's retro sleaze market(uh, is there such a market?).

It has Charlotte Rampling, queen of Eurotrash (remember the Night Porter?) who, oddly enough, has the most "straight" role here. As usual, she channels Lauren Bacall (good looking woman, she), and gets through a fairly lackluster part. She's always better than her material and wears some very stylish togs for someone who just works as an interpreter. Michael Sarazin, former pretty boy and Jacqueline Bisset boyfriend (he was in a good tv version of Frankenstein) is now a little long in the tooth, but still has a striking appearance and soulful eyes. Here he's a somewhat unbelievable Police Superintendent and has some wild scenes that come off... shall we say, a trifle campy. Derek de Lint (from Unbearable Lightness of Being, a fav film of mine) is a heterosexual costume designer for the opera. De Lint, a popular star in European film, must have taken this part for the money. He's mostly a foil for Sarazin and love interest for Rampling.

But there's more. Next we have cult performer Romy Haag (a well known transgender artiste from the 70's through 90's, friend of Bowie's, etc.) as the madam-manager of an underground club where closeted bigwigs go to hear drag queens, etc. lip sink to opera (yes, when there's operatic music that's a sure sign of Eurotrash). Topping it off is the gorgeous Eva Robin's (that's how her name is usually spelled), Italian transgendered star of music, tv, fashion and film as a character with the absurd name of "Pepper". Now Robin's is about as unlikely a "Pepper" as I've ever encountered. She looks gorgeous and has a scene that prominently displays her manhood front and center. This was a good 5 years before the Crying Game. Shameless exploitation? ... you bet. But what happens next is a shocking reminder of how much violence there really is against transgendered people and how it's often reported with a kind of titillation rather than as a human rights issue. The cinematography and mood in this film are striking, even as the script and some of the acting are laughable. It all made me want to take a trip to Europe, wear something fashionable and walk around some nameless urban landscape late at night looking for a niteclub to go to as blue signs flash "cambio, wechsel, change."

Mascara could be a good date movie, if you're dating someone with really sleazy, bizarre tastes. I found it infinitely more entertaining than Showgirls, and look how beloved that flick has become since it had its initial flush down the toilet?

It's almost as if the film-makers only had enough material for 25-30 minutes after which they told the actors to 'just make it up as you go along' because really that's how it seems. The ending is dreadful. Poor Charlotte Rampling, looks lovely but has nothing much to do beyond being neurotic. Michael Sarrazin somehow convinces as a Belgian police superintendent despite being an foppish Opera buff with an American accent.

The trouble is how ever I looked at it I couldn't shake the feeling that Mascara was just plain exploitative. Sure the rich men are exploiting their playmates, but I actually think it's more than that: it feels like the director set out to make an exploitation film. It didn't feel camp to me.

The location really does the film no favours. I could certainly see this happening in New York or Paris, but a sea-side town on the Belgian coast with it own very high-end fetish club? I don't think so. The faded seaside grandeur gives the movie an inappropriately wistful feel.

Some of the actors are dubbed with strange voices. I'm not sure what the aim here was but it just doesn't work.

There are few powerful scene - the opera ones for instance. In the first 25 minutes there is some sizzling dialogue. And the dress with it's illuminating heart is a very striking and novel idea. Those reasons pull my rating of the film to 5/10 otherwise it'd be a straight 2/10.

So imagine if Bob Guccione kidnapped Werner Schroeter, forced him onto a diet of magic mushrooms, and at a point of a gun and with the regular administration of scopolamine put him to work making a serial killer movie. That's Mascara.

I actually can't believe I just watched that movie. I had an odd defeated day, and I got some Mazarin Omnipollo beer in (tastes as good as it sounds) and knew I needed to see something off the chain. I hadn't figured out how far off the chain this movie was, psychologically it was like being in an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon watching this movie. In my long film watching experience it has set a new high watermark for the bizarre. Carlo Ponti famously exclaimed "What?" when he saw a film Polanski made that was then in homage called "What?". But Polanski was a mere amateur at confusion compared to Patrick Conrad, the director of Mascara.

Police superintendent Bert Sanders (Michael Sarrazin) is an opera maven, and regularly attends with his sister Gaby Hart (Charlotte Rampling). There is more than a small hint that these two have a closer relationship than is recommendable between siblings. Sanders, in his late 40s, lives in with sis, and has massive problems with sublimated desire and sexual confusion. He visits a secret underground club where leading citizens dress in black tie, and watch drag queens lip sync Strauss and Gluck as well as pop music (including a Kris Kristofferson song). There's also some highly stylised S&M going on in antechambers. He's in a chaste relationship with a transsexual girlfriend who does cabaret at the club. When she comes onto him, all hell breaks loose, the tonne of psychosexual gelignite in his head blows sky high and he spends the rest of the movie alternating between catatonia and psychosis, digging himself in deeper whilst covering his tracks and trying to stop his sister getting with the dressmaker for the local opera house.

Parts of the movie have genuine pathos and are tres trans sympatico, but others seem almost hideously exploitational. The impression comes across that Partick Conrad is messing with you with some of the twists, like an experiment in blowing the viewer's mind.

And you know Charlotte Rampling is in the midst of all this acting her skin off at points. Unbelievable. She was not afraid of appearing in off the charts projects for sure, The Flesh of the Orchid is another superb example (no way could she have pretended that she was off for a straightforward gig with that one, not when James Hadley Chase wrote it!!!).

Wanna get unhinged? Put on some Mascara baby.

For a nominal "suspense" film, this provides precious few thrills. The romantic subplot involving wimpy, neurotic Charlotte Rampling and the less-than-compelling Derek de Lint goes nowhere. Pointless fantasy sequences are introduced, and the backstory relating to the serial killings of the local drag population is never developed.

On the plus side, the cinematography is a treat-- long moody sequences shot in a half-empty Belgian seacoast resort. And this is, after all, the film that pioneered the "Crying Game" scene-- reason enough to see it, in my book.