The Blackout

I don't understand all the negative reviews at imdb about this movie. There are a lot of things I liked. First, the camera techniques are wonderful and capture that floaty feeling when a person is high, confused, and purposeless. Second, i love the idea of a person blacking out during a critical moment of their lives, and feeling the need to reconstruct the events in order to know themselves. This movie did a great job of using this device as the plot. Third, the ending came as a surprise...it is not revealed until the last 10 minutes and it comes as a surprise that feels quite right.

I might add that I loved the scene when Modine drinks again, alone in a hotel room, and feels that familiar, egotistical feeling, as if drinking and getting high are enough to make a person important or substantive.

What is real stimulating about an Abel Ferrara movie is that, whether you like it or not, it'll never leave you indifferent. In my point of view, "The Blackout" is not among the better ones, I'd even call it a failure, but has some great moments and several points of interest. After all, it comes from Ferrara, one of the most personal looks in cinema today, and what comes from a great director, even if it's not that good, at least it's worth trying.

Be aware: it's difficult to come into "The Blackout" because it's basically confusing (too much I have to say). But even if it's not well handled, this style is coherent with the argument as far as Ferrara wants to bring to images the point of view of an alcoholic during a monumental hangover.

If you are capable of going through the first thirty minutes, you'll be rewarded with an stimulating reflection about addiction and the limits between fiction and reality: the key of the main character's enigmatic hangover seems to be found in the filming of an experimental movie... another excuse to reflect on the dark side of movie making and the status of the director.

Try it. Maybe you'll like it or maybe you'll end leaving it in the middle, but at least, this film will make you react in some way, which is not very usual in cinema today.

We're all stuck with narrow selves through the day, doing our best to mind our part in the noisy, incoherent narrative of life, organizing a myriad worries with one eye at the clock. At nights however, some nights, we dream, have passionate sex or watch truly mind-bending movies, drawing fresh water from the well of deep, mysterious non-self which is the great dancefloor where lovers meet their dragon.

So here's a film about a man haunted by a half-remembered night from his past, who wakes up inside a dream to find himself. The film begins and ends with shots of the protagonist in his own primordial sea, the sea of clarity and dissolved self. He is a famous actor, to stress the roles and guises of that weekday showbiz self we carry with us everywhere. A lot of time is spent around film sets and cameras.

The film is split in two very clear halves, a usual trope of films about memory since Vertigo; the long, blurry Miami night of sexual obsession and going back 18 months later. Overt drugging and boozing insert the dazedness of mind. The meta-aspects of the work involving a sex video being made and 'looking back' through cameras are thin and obvious. And Ferrara's attempt at a script-less improvised feel among the actors does not pan out in the least, not solely Modine's fault this.

My guess is that it does not pan out because Ferrara is not a genuinely curious, patient person like Altman who takes pleasure in the tentative brushing of characters, Ferrara is eager to get to the bleeding soul. I don't have to reach out to his other films to confirm this, here's a film about yearnings but only as acknowledged through an overbearing sense of misery and self-pity.

The obvious self-reference. The emotional bluntness. The shouting and partying as some acidic edge. These are all the same, short narrative distance away from the viewer. The film can be described as David Lynch films Le Mepris but all that French, Godardian baggage are as cumbersome now as thirty years prior. So in narrative terms, it is a modest failure.

And yet I recommend this to you on its power to enchant with its visual fabrics. There are all sorts of those:

1) the sex video as in-sight of our guy's hallucinative desires, and grainy handcamera footage as memory, fixing the mind. Dennis Hopper anchors this part as director, channeling both his Blue Velvet and Last Movie chaotic selves. 2) raw, cutting intimacy around the lovely Dalle. 3) warm coziness in New York, with smart usage of Claudia Schiffer as token of bloodless normalcy. 4) the b/w, Nouvelle Vague- inspired interlude at the beach.

You may settle in one or more of those. I settle in the Miami reverie, not the pleasure-seeking itself but those fleeting drive-by shots of nightlife and cloudy views from balconies, the gauzy loss of self and story. Marvelous, marvelous mood. If you mute the drama, it can sink into you.

It takes a while to get into the movie's mood - Modine's druggy trawl through a razor-sharp Miami is not very well differentiated despite Ferrara's excellent handling, teetering at the edge of surrender to the prevailing decadence but always retaining a distinct alienation and fascinated disgust. Later on the style becomes more tightly formal and controlled, befitting Modine's cleared up state, and Ferrara's portrayal of his obsession and disquietude is very effective in a more conventionally expositional way. Towards the end the mechanics of the ultimate revelation really take over, but Hopper's final long profane shouting fit at Modine after he learns the truth is too hard-hitting to be set aside, and the high-risk final image is oddly touching - the movie is a plausible account of a true lost soul grappling for stability in a world of temptation and internal darkness, with neat (albeit stunt) casting.

Neurosis and character antipathy do not make for commercial success. THE BLACKOUT bypassed cinemas in the US, and here in Australia. The multiplex monster has no room for mavericks like Ferrara.

As there are no others quite like the rebellious Ferrara, he takes liberties from his own catalogue. This time, there are shades of SNAKE EYES (1993), and it pre-empts NEW ROSE HOTEL (1998). In form though, it owes much more to Hitchcock, and VERTIGO.

Like VERTIGO, THE BLACKOUT masquerades as a thriller, but is more concerned with the nature of identity. Relocating to Miami, the film is aesthetically great, though Modine looks (justifiably) clueless. The axis of the film is the concept rather than plot and the clash of high-art pretension with low-brow sleaze is conscious.

Some ideas don't come off, and the form of THE BLACKOUT is awkward. But if it is too cold and removed for most filmgoers tastes, it is still a showcase for an uncompromising, daring director, willing to upset accepted conventions.

The biggest disappointment is that his invention is left in this case to an unheralded release, and will go largely unnoticed.