gbill-74877

"And we decided to celebrate our end like the doomed in the movies do."

I loved the look and feel of this Argentinian noir, with its flashbacks, surreal dream sequences, and segues into the inner thoughts of its main character. Instead of a femme fatale we get a tragic figure (Aída Luz), and instead of everything coming apart because of a con game, we get drama out of misunderstanding and paranoia. These are basically good people, driven to dark places by economic desperation, with the post-war conditions in Europe looming as a distant backdrop. I wasn't completely sure about the ending, as the digging wouldn't have to be too deep and the guy should have known it (being vague here on purpose), but I loved how brutally grim it was. Overall, a very satisfying film.

"What more can you expect from a society that itself spends 44% of its tax dollars on killing?"

As novel as it was to see Tony Curtis in a role counter to his usual type, this didn't work for me on any level, and it was a difficult two hours to get through.

My issues:

• Fleischer's ridiculous use of split screens, sometimes showing five shots at once, did not add a thing to the storytelling and were an annoying distraction.

• The focus on the police procedural in the first half and the amateurish psychology in the second half was incredibly tedious. For a movie about a community gripped in fear over a serial killer, this was as dry as toast to me. Henry Fonda as the bland investigator didn't help.

• Meanwhile, I didn't learn anything about the victims, and didn't learn much at all about the strangler either, or at least, the man all the murders were chalked up to, possibly incorrectly.

• The multiple personality disorder diagnosis given to Albert DeSalvo was completely invented, making all of the dated psychological investigation which followed also rubbish. It made me wonder about historical accuracy for the rest of it, Fonda's role in particular, and in any event, I never felt like what I was watching was real. All of that undercut the noble aim expressed at the end of the film, and made it seemed like borderline exploitation.

There's a lot of power in this film, which is about a group historically underrepresented and usually discarded: women of a certain age in Hollywood. Despite being in fantastic shape, a middle-aged woman (Demi Moore) is being moved along by a sleazy producer (Dennis Quaid), and in her desire to cling to youth and stardom, is willing to do anything, without questions. The split self nightmare that results is like Faust meeting Kafka, and seems to mirror how society generally works, with the younger self (Margaret Qualley) overly fetishized, and the older self expected to just disappear. Everything is out of balance, and internally it creates the depressing condition where the younger self hates the older self, and the older self loves the younger self. The pain and rage of older women from time immemorial are vented in a delirious finale, one that doesn't hold back.