Movie Review: Irreversible (2002)

Where can lines safely and firmly be drawn between pleasures, perversions, and outright transgressions? Are such lines possible, or have the boundaries between sexual acceptability and indecency become too dangerously blurred?

Gaspar Noé's beautiful yet nerve-shatteringly disturbing tragedy Irreversible examines this theme among many other insightful inquiries.

Throughout history, various periods have been marked by more or less accepting attitudes toward deviant sexual practices. In our present time, a long list of sexual fetishes have entered the common lexicon: sadism, masochism, bondage, coprophagia, water sports, fisting, electrostimulation, furrydom, and so forth into more obscure territories. These perversions in essence are harmless. Consensual, safe, democratic participation is sought on the parts of all parties, even when the playacting involves dangerous rape. Many people today (though certainly not all) will respect another person's desire to privately engage in consensual and legal though unusual sexual practices in private with their partners, even if they don't find those particular practices appealing. Kinks and fetishes, embarrassing and private as they are, are more widespread and thus less abnormal than the average person will admit, so a tolerant attitude is in part a reaction against hypocrisy.

Sexual pleasure is a peculiar thing. Who can say where and how it's hardwired in the brain? While some people--guided by religion or tradition or their own personal preferences--will maintain set, narrow guidelines for the circumstances under which any normal person should be able to derive suitable sexual pleasure, others will admit that what works for one person might not work for all. Conflicts over what makes good sex arise even within close, loving relationships.

In a late scene in Irreversible--which, chronologically, is an early scene since the film is told in reverse--Alex (Monica Bellucci) discusses with her current (Vincent Cassel) and her ex-boyfriend (Albert Dupontel) the conditions that allow her to orgasm. Ex-boyfriend Pierre was very loving but a failed lover, whereas present boyfriend Marcus is a selfish pig who achieves excellent results in bed. They have this loud and explicit conversation in public on a crowded Metro car, which seems oddly indiscreet to me being a southern American but which perhaps is more commonplace in Paris, where nobody even turns a head, pointing to a very sexually tolerant and permissible environment. Pierre talks to his dedication to lovemaking--his orgasmic self-sacrifice, his physical diversity, his poetic whispers, all of which were unsuccessful. At which point Alex admits that what is most important to her is the satisfaction of the man she's with. She doesn't want a man sacrificing his orgasms for her continued pleasure; she wants a man who is having a great time. If the man comes, then she will come.

This admission is eerily ironic given that later in the night (and earlier in the film) Alex is raped by someone entirely interested in his own pleasure. Needless to say, she does not enjoy this. The rapist, a bisexual pimp known as Le Tenia, "the Tapeworm" (Jo Prestia), is a sneering, ugly parasite who extorts money from transgendered prostitutes and spends his free time at The Rectum, a red-lit, underground labyrinth of extreme sexual deviancy. Accustomed to an environment where men willingly beg to be raped, tortured, tied up, and fisted and where exploited sex workers are more or less willing to submit to fantasies of domination and adultery, Le Tenia's perceptions of acceptable interpersonal behavior are, to say the least, warped. He compliments Alex as he rapes her, and as he holds a knife to her face he asks her if she is turned on by the sadism. His words hover somewhere between mocking derision and a genuine belief that this passing woman might actually enjoy the brutal sex act, like so many in the past who have enjoyed simulated rape with him while pretending to resist.

There is no forgiving Le Tenia, however, for his actions are rooted not in an attempt to share good sex with Alex but in a hateful, destructive derision. Le Tenia comes across Alex in a red-lit, filthy, concrete highway underpass while threatening one of his hookers. Alex cowers in response to the violence, a fearful reaction that titillates Le Tenia. Though he is not normally interested in women, he is motivated to rape Alex by a desire to punish her--first and foremost for having witnessed his indiscretion, but mostly out of jealous rage against her beauty, wealth, and normality. His gruesome crime is in part an act of class warfare, a violent revolt against the bourgeois morality that he imagines she represents. By raping her, by accusing her of enjoying it, and by ultimately destroying her physically with his fists and feet, Le Tenia attempts to taint the pure, white-clad Alex with his subterranean evil.

On a certain level, Irreversible is a bellicose depiction of a clash between classes, an upper and a lower class divided not by economic status but by values, a division made trivial by being wrought with hypocrisy. In the opening scene, a fat, naked man confesses to his accepting friend that he went to prison for having sex with his daughter. Despite his own severe depravity, he allows himself the superiority of deriding the gay men who flock to the Rectum club in his neighborhood. He is an incestuous, pedophile rapist, but at least he's not a queer! Alex's boyfriend Marcus is an adulterous, immature drug addict, but when he launches on a reckless course to avenge his battered girlfriend, he allows himself to launch insults against everyone he passes, including those who help him. He beats a man at the sex club who is the only person who can identify the rapist for him. He chastises gay men in a restaurant, even though they can help him find the Rectum club where the rapist cavorts. He hurls racist insults at and steals the cab of a Chinese taxi driver who is driving him to his destination. Most tellingly, he assaults and threatens the transsexual prostitute who can tell him exactly who raped his girlfriend. His unnecessary violence is no different or better than the beating that Le Tenia gave to the very same hooker earlier in the night (later in the film), the beating that involved Alex in Le Tenia's life.

Marcus considers himself better than the trash he comes across during his vengeful journey into hell, but not only does he need this trash in order to continue his journey, he is also no different or better than the trash.

Even Pierre, easily the noblest man in the film, is not without sin. A professor and philosopher, he is reserved, mature, and calm, and he expresses a genuine concern for Alex's safety and feelings, but even he is preoccupied with sex, crossing boundaries to engage Alex in the explicit discussion on the Metro, which she tolerates even though she is obviously unhappy with it. Alex allows room for an indiscretion, and Pierre unashamedly takes it. A complex film about rape must also say something about personal space and consent, and Irreversible chillingly hints at these specifics. In the final scene of the film, a bedroom scene between Marcus and Alex, the nude and horny Marcus prods at various taboos, aggressively seeking new territory from Alex that she hesitantly relents to. There is talk of sexual punishment and of anal sex. The talk is gentle and consensual, but in what ways does it erase the boundaries between what Alex truly wants, what she's willing to give, and what she might be forced to give? Structured as the climax of the film--following the revenge, the rape, and the argument--these scene is charged with a power it otherwise wouldn't have if the film were told linearly. Given our knowledge of what will happen later in the night, we see the rape from within this scene as an explicit, external culmination of Alex's internal fears about her relationship--that she is losing control. She has just learned she is pregnant (the final revelation of the film, which adds a horrifying twist to the rape and beating), and she is unable to control her lover--the baby's father--in bed in ways that she should be able to control him. This powerless escalates at the Metro, where she is forced into an uncomfortable, indecent conversation by the one man she does seem to trust and where she feels subjugated to her man, who wraps his arm around her and cups her breast in a very possessive way. (It's easy not to notice her face during this scene, since Pierre and Marcus do all the talking at this moment, but the expression that covers her as Marcus wraps his arm around her torso is one of surreal horror and helplessness.) At the party, she loses complete control of how her life should be ordered. Her boyfriend, a future father who should be acting responsible and committed to her, abandons himself in drugs and attempts to seduce numerous other women. When she leaves the party and--unable to hail a cab--crosses through the underpass on the advice of a stranger ("It's safer!"), her life descends into complete hopeless chaos. She is anally raped and beaten into a coma. Her universe dissolves.

Gaspar Noé offers predestination as a consideration in the film. The title, the backwards structure, the spiraling omniscient camera, and the epitaph "Time Destroys Everything" encourage this thought process, as do a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alex's references to a philosophical book about time that she is reading. Premonitory dreams alert us to the future according to the book, and Alex indeed dreams about entering the red tunnel before it happens. (Marcus also dreams about being unable to feel his arm, which inversely foretells the fact that later in the night he will have that same arm broken.) Everything is written beforehand, the author claims, and fate cannot be changed. We experience this firsthand by watching the film, since we have already seen what is coming. Knowing that the future is miserable, we likewise feel the same helplessness that Alex feels, though we witness it in reverse. Gaspar Noé has made a truly discomforting and terrifying film, the most disturbing one I have ever seen, and this is fitting given that his two major themes are two of the ugliest elements of human nature: sexual and physical violence--or, more specifically, rape and revenge.

The early scenes of the film detail Marcus's revenge tragedy. When we first see him in the film, he is being hospitalized and Pierre is being arrested, so we know--as in any revenge tragedy--that things will end poorly. To explain things chronologically, after discovering Alex's comatose body, Marcus and Pierre are interrogated by the police. The police know nothing, and the best lead they are able to come up with is that Pierre did it. In the depths of their dismay, the duo is approached by two soft-spoken thugs who promise inside information and revenge. The police are for pussies, they claim. Revenge is for men. The two thugs exploit the tragedy, seeking payment, of course, but they deliver on their promise. Navigating the criminal underworld, Alex and Pierre are led underground to the cavernous corridors of the Rectum.

At this point Pierre insists that revenge is for animals. Men should derive their actions from the higher faculties. Rather than pursue a path that can only lead to ultimate destruction, they should go to the hospital to sit with Alex. Marcus refuses to listen. Though he could care less about Alex when they were at the party, now he must overcompensate to avenge his woman. Finding the man he believes to be Le Tenia, he starts a fight before a live audience of sex fiends. He is quickly overpowered, however, and the man snaps his arm in half.

At this point Pierre, who has maintained his cool throughout the hunt despite being profoundly upset by Alex's fate, knocks down the assailant with a fire extinguisher and then proceeds to repeatedly bash in the man's skull with the heavy, thudding instrument. The man's jaw quivers as his blood splattered face caves in. Though one or two hits would surely suffice, calm and passionless Pierre is overpowered by rage and revenge. He demolishes the man beyond repair. By showing this extremely brutal murder in one of the opening sequences of the film rather than at the end, we are forced to examine the outcome of revenge without regard to its incitement. The revenge is horrible, animalistic, primal, demonic. It unlocks something in Pierre that can never be covered up, and it kills an innocence in him that can never be regained. By seeing the revenge before knowing why it's happening, we have no desire to cheer for it or support it. We must examine it on its own terms and decide that there can be no justification for its brutality.

Even more unsettling--though this is not readily apparent on first viewing--is that they attack the wrong man. Le Tenia is one of the passive spectators of the fight, who smiles and snorts drugs while devouring the murder with his eyes. Though the thug informants promised results--that the rapist would be punished instead of, at worst, spending a peaceful life being cared for in prison--the consequences of reckless revenge are disastrous. The wrong man is destroyed, the guilty man will now probably never be caught, and the avengers will be punished instead. Not to mention that nothing can change that Alex was raped and beaten.

The men at the sex club watch the beating but in no way involve themselves in trying to stop it. Some of them even encourage grislier violence, like spectators at the Roman circus. Given the nature of film, we are spectators, too, though different in that we could not help or change things even if we wanted to. One of the most horrifying images in this thoroughly horrifying film is the silhouette of a man who passes in the background of the underpass while Alex is being raped. He takes a few steps forward, pauses, and then hurriedly leaves. Did he realize it was rape, or did he think it was consensual, perverse sex that he should just tolerate and ignore? If he realized it was rape, why didn't he interfere? Would we interfere--or, more importantly, would we interfere after having seen this film and this shadow of a passerby? By showing us this nightmare, Gaspar Noé prepares us to react heroically in the (hopefully never-will-happen) event that we find ourselves in the same position as the faceless passerby. Hopefully, we will not remain faceless, retreating in the shadows. Hopefully, we will know to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. In a rare bit of heroism in the film, the prostitutes rise up with curses and sticks to defend their troubled sister when Marcus attacks one of the prostitutes. Courage like this is in short supply in Irreversible.

There is an infinite variety of sexual practices. Many of them are fine. Some of them aren't. The nude man's friend in the opening scene laughingly dismisses the man's incestuous rape as merely "the Western syndrome," par for the course. When Alex's mutilated body is discovered, some of the spectators on the sidewalk seem satisfied and entertained. "Some whore got raped!" one of them cheers, as though the fact that the woman may have worked in the sex industry makes it okay that she was nearly killed. Rape is never okay, but how can you tell when rape is actually rape in a world where some people genuinely want to be raped in a way that looks, feels, and sounds like rape yet isn't actually rape?

Irreversible is a clever and complicated film that operates on many levels. Though unsettling to the core, the film is a beautiful work of craftsmanship. Gaspar Noé's fluid, ghostlike camera (with cinematographer Benoît Debie) weaves in and out of cars and buildings, hovering and spinning, inducing vertigo and nausea in the viewer. Cuts are seamless, giving the impression of one endless (though nonlinear!) take, a feeling which increases the dramatic inertia and hopelessness of the film's story. The acting, largely improvisational, is flawless, with desperation pervading in the lives of normal people. Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk did the score, a pounding, hellish, nerve-shocking techno soundscape that regulates the heartbeat in stressful ways. Visual effects by Rodolphe Chabrier are more extensive than they appear (a good mark of any special effects artist) since the impressive camerawork, cutting, and detailing received a thorough (though unnoticeable) digital makeover. The bashed in skull of the man in the revenge scene, one of the most unforgettable and macabre moments of cinematic history, was impressively fabricated using a combination of matte painting, latex models, 3D imaging, and acting. The attention to detail--a jaw that gasps for air even after the rest of the face has been rendered unrecognizable--turns just another murder into one of the most gruesome murders ever filmed, and Chabrier should have received more recognition for that.

Irreversible is an unpleasant film, and many will avoid trying to think about it too hard, if indeed they're even able to watch the whole thing. Though they may dismiss the film as sensational, the film has much to say, and the sensation is intended to moralize rather than glamorize (this boundary is never crossed). Irreversible treats horrifying, unsettling, and difficult themes with horrifying, unsettling, and difficult filmmaking techniques, and in this regard Gaspar Noé is an artist of the highest caliber. Though I can't recommend it to the faint of heart, Irreversible is one of the most important and life-changing films of recent years.

Irreversible (2002)
d/w: Gaspar Noé
(Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel)
10/10

Movie Review: Touch of Evil (1958)

The story behind Touch of Evil, the final film of the film noir genre, is perhaps more interesting than the convoluted plot of marijuana smugglers, dynamite explosives, and illegal immigrants. Slated as a B film, Touch of Evil was to star Orson Welles alongside Charlton Heston, but confused Heston thought that Welles was also attached to direct, and being the superstar that he was, he pulled his weight and the studio made it happen. Thus Welles filmed this so-called masterpiece, which ranks #21 on the TSPDT? list, using extremely long takes (now considered cutting edge) in order to keep the film under its original budget.

Without Welles's touch, this movie most certainly would have been forgotten by now. A sensational plot about lesbians in leather jackets smuggling mary jane across the Mexican border, Charlton Heston in brownface with a mustache, Janet Leigh's hysterics, a cartoonish Dennis Weaver gnawing at the scenery--the first hour, excluding the famous long take of the opening shot, adds up to a bunch of boredom.

Only one thing keeps the film from falling to pieces: Orson Welles as Captain Hank Quinlan, a limping, obese, slurring police detective that you just know is dripping with sleaze and probably behind all the murder and corruption in town. A recovering alcoholic, he's now addicted to candy bars, stuffing them into his huge, hairy face as he grimaces and leers. His town is a filthy one, bordering on lawlessness, and he knows that only he can regulate it, assigning himself full impunity to execute methods, no matter how unorthodox, for bringing justice to his kingdom.

He acts on hunches that he intuits from his crippled leg, which isn't exactly something we'd grant sovereignty to, though we never see it actually make a mistake. The limb is the perfect symbol for showcasing Quinlan. On the one hand, in the vein of wicked witches with crooked noses and leering maniacs with hunchbacks and scars, the broken leg is a sign of his deformity, what separates him from full, normal humanity, the most obvious physical manifestation of his unattractiveness. On the other hand, he received the injury while intercepting a bullet and saving his partner's (Joseph Calleia) life, an heroic act the partner claims is only outshone by his success in climbing on the wagon and freeing himself from alcoholism. The limp is unsightly, but it was caused by valor, just as his obesity is monstrous yet, we realize, only developed when he began replacing drinks with less harmful sweets. Finally, the leg is a sign of his power; it supplies him with clairvoyant knowledge, which is regarded and acted upon as gospel though we can choose to dismiss it as superstition. The impulsive hunches his leg stirs up have more power than the words of any informant.

And so we have a complex, compelling antagonist--racist, deceitful, and egotistical, yet dedicated to justice, capable of heroism, and full of determination.

I hesitate to talk about the end of this film, which is the only part that redeems it and makes it somewhat worth calling a masterpiece. Though my reviews are often full of spoilers, to talk in depth about the beautifully shot, Shakespearean climax seems to cross even my line. So, stop reading now if you want.

A murder occurs as part of an elaborate setup, and the partner whose job has been to plant key, implicating evidence that has always led to convictions finally discovers a real piece of crucial evidence at the crime scene. The evidence, a cane, however, indicts Quinlan, who has always given the orders to plant the suspects his leg fingers. Ironically, the film's first real clue points to the one responsible for all the fake clues.

The partner, despite trusting in Quinlan for all these years, despite having knowingly participated in many illegal activities in pursuit of ending crime, decides that murder is too far. Mexican narcotics agent Mike Vargas (Heston), a no-nonsense, straight laced investigator, offers the partner a means of pursuing true justice unsullied by evil, and so they work together to bring down Quinlan, using official police procedures.

The partner tries to procure a confession while wearing a wire. Quinlan, pissdrunk after reaching the breaking point and falling off the wagon, sneers at him in disgust. "What is that you're wearing?" He shakes his head. "Guilt."

You shouldn't have killed him, the partner says. You're a cop. Cops kill, Quinlan responds. It's a dirty job. "You didn't have to make it dirty," his partner says.

Quinlan discovers the bug and the deception from his best friend, and now aware that his old and proven inquisitional methods are against the new and weak yet honest methods of Vargas, he clumsily shoots the partner whose life he once saved, getting blood on his hands in the process.

He stumbles to the filthy Rio Grande to cleanse his apparent sin. An agent of the new justice kills him, and from the bridge above, the blood of his slain friend drops back onto his hands. Defeated and dead, he collapses into the dreck.

An onlooker--a prostitute he once loved (Marlene Dietrich)--watches his swollen corpse with more disappointment than sadness. Isn't someone going to come and take him away, she asks Vargas. In a few minutes, someone will do it, he responds. The body floats, filthy, sad, and perhaps too undignified. Would you like to say some words, Vargas asks the woman. "He was some kind of a man," she says. "What does it matter what you say about people?"

Which is the point of the movie, what makes it a phenomenal film despite so many things going against it. In a cinematic world of hoo-hahing nemeses with laundry lists of violent sins and neurotic motivations paired against strong, handsome heroes with one or two forgivable flaws that never get in the way of saving the day, Hank Quinlan joins the ranks of more realistic characters like Daniel Plainview of There Will Be Blood, the flawed, complicated, ugly, pathetic, but not flat-out evil humans who inhabit the real world. He has only a touch of evil. Unloved and unloving, disgusting yet sympathetic, driven by virtue but tarnished by the filth all around him, Quinlan is a true and honest portrait of a dishonest man.

Touch of Evil
d/w: Orson Welles
(Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, Joseph Calleia)
7/10

Movie Review: Dressed to Kill (1980)

Brian De Palma's 1980 sexual thriller is as schizophrenic as its transgendered antagonist, a mishmash film that juxtaposes masterful, taut scenes of suspense with implausible, poorly acted moments of happenstance and illogic. Never before or since have terrible and wonderful scenes coexisted so seamlessly in one film.

The movie opens with a starch-haired Angie Dickinson and her pornographic body double arousing herself in a shower while gazing with opium eyes at a shirtless, shaving Michael Caine. It's an erotic dream, of course; in reality, Dickinson's character Kate is married to a clumsily sexual businessman and Dr. Robert Elliott is merely her married, ethical psychiatrist in the Upper East Side, whom she sees frequently to talk about her sexual frustrations. Women are all about sex in Dressed to Kill, with money as a side interest. Kate wants to screw doctors and Wall Street brokers, while the only other female character, Liz Blake (Nancy Allen), is a high end escort who brokers stock deals on one phone while arranging $500 "hot lunch" dates on another and who collects art only as a financial investment (you see, the price rises when the artist dies).

One morning, after a session of miserable, marital sex; an expository conversation with her teenage Harry Potter-look-alike son Peter, a manic inventor developing a room-sized supercomputer that both "carries" and "stores" binary numbers (thousands of them!); and a visit to Dr. Elliott in which she offers her body up only to be rejected, Kate goes to the art museum to stare at paintings of gorillas, people watch, record entries like "egg nog" in her schedule, and cruise for sex with strangers. She's a classy broad dressed all in white with white gloves on, and when a possible sexmate ignores her advances, she removes her left glove to reveal her enormous wedding ring, proving to him that she wasn't interested in the first place while also giving him the cue to make the next move. He hastily runs off, and she forgets her glove on the bench while she chases him through the museum's various rooms and corridors.

This is the first scene in which De Palma reveals that he's not just a hack. Ten minutes without dialogue (overlaid with an outdated score) ensue as the two engage in a cat-and-mouse game of flirtatious stalking. He feigns indifference and disgust at her advances. She gives up in frustration. He smiles and stares and follows her. She approaches; he ducks away and disappears. Finally, he discovers her glove, puts it on his own hand, and lays it on her shoulder from behind--contact! She screams. It's more than she bargained before, and she runs out of the museum, only later realizing that he was trying to return her glove. In the end, he's in a taxicab, waving her glove out the backseat window, and as she approaches he all but rapes her, much to her delight.

Aggressive fucking in his opulent apartment follows, and as she rifles through his stuff while dressing, she discovers his letter from the health department confirming his syphilis ("You have contracted a venereal disease!"). The story has a moral after all: a single act of extramarital sex leads to blindness, dementia, and death, though her death is instantaneous. A bulky blond has been following her and waits outside the elevator for no good reason (if she's stalking Kate, she should be running down the stairs she was hiding in during the afternoon of fucking, not waiting for the elevator to descend seven floors and then ascend seven more floors on the oft-chance that Kate has coincidentally happened to forget her wedding ring on the syphilitic businessman's end table, returning to the seventh floor where the bulky blond stands awkwardly poised with a straight razor, somehow knowing that Kate would be coming back up) and enters, hacking her to death in a poorly-edited, fakey death scene. Like I said, an illogical moment of ineffective sensationalism follows immediately on the heels of ten flawless minutes.

Anyway, the elevator stops on the sixth floor while the blond's still hacking away, exposing the grisly sight to a cowardly businessman who instantly flees down the stairs and Liz Blake the high-end whore, whose hands-almost-on-the-frozen-face-while-eyes-shake-and-widen reaction is one of the worst "I'm witnessing a murder" expressions I've ever seen.

The blond gets away (nobody tries to stop her--nobody ever tries to stop her throughout the movie), and everyone ends up in the office of Detective Marino (Dennis Franz, who's sometimes good and sometimes awful, like everything else in this movie), including Dr. Elliott, whose reasons for being called there are valid--he was one of the last people known to have seen Kate and also knew a lot about her mental condition on that day--but who is harassed by Marino for no good reason in a poorly written moment of unrealistic plotting and directorial misdirection. Marino wants to know about the "weirdos" that Robert consults because he's convinced that even though the murder happened hours and miles away from her appointment at his office the murderer must have been one of his crazy patients. (You see, the only people who go to expensive psychiatrists in New York are psychopaths.)

And guess what!, the good doctor keeps getting calls from one of his patients, Bobbi, a whining, pathetic man trapped in a woman's body who admits she stole Robert's razor, fears she might be a naughty girl, and intends to murder his little "cocktease" patient, all because he won't sign some papers to help her get her official sex reassignment surgery. But Dr. Elliott doesn't tell the police this; he wants to get in touch with her first, make amends, make certain that she really committed the murder that she predicts and then confesses to in her voicemails before getting her in trouble. WTF?

It makes sense in the end--you see, Robert predictably is Bobbi--but before the outrageously offensive climax and resolution, the movie has one more minority group to insult--those black men, all of whom, from gangbangers to security guards, just want to attack and rape silly, sex-starved white women. But that's just an added bonus, in case demeaning caricatures of women and transgendered people weren't quite enough.

Back to Bobbi/Robert, who is finally caught and shot one stormy night in his office, having been tracked down and duped by Liz in conjunction with the technologically savvy Peter (who uses everything from stopwatches to video cameras to homemade mace in his detective work). You see, Dr. Elliott is schizophrenically torn between two sides, his natural "male side" (vain, ragingly heterosexual, hormonally-charged) and his optimal "female side" (petty, jealous, violent). When the male side gets aroused--say, by Kate's cockteasing advances or Liz's prostitute beauty--the envious female side tries to compensate by killing the intruder and shrinking his enormous boner. This laughable explanation is offered by the reputed Dr. Levy in the final scene, who's introduced simply to make it all official.

De Palma attempts to one-up Psycho. He doesn't.

Still don't buy it? Well, a light-hearted bonus scene is thrown in during which Liz reductively explains transsexual behavior and surgery to Peter during a hot lunch at an exquisite restaurant while a staunch old woman eavesdrops in the background while exaggeratedly expressing her shock and disgust. We're supposed to sympathize with this old woman--it's all rather unsettling, isn't it!--or at best see ourselves as more "progressive" (read: jaded) than her--yes, yes, it is unsettling, but it's just a part of this crazy, mixed-up world we live in!

Out of context, a handful of well-executed scenes occupy this clumsy, insulting film. De Palma can evoke tension and even some good acting and witty dialogue when he's focused; it's just the sum of the parts that don't cohere, and the gaps between them are massive. He also uses unfair trickery to aid his twist. Bobbi is played by not one, not two, but three characters--Michael Caine, a male voice on the phone, and a female body double for the murder and stalking scenes. How are we supposed to figure out the twist when we're presented with lies? (Oh yeah, because it's extremely predictable.) A really good mystery shouldn't have to resort to that.

Dressed to Kill (1980)
d/w: Brian De Palma
(Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, Angie Dickinson, Dennis Franz)
4/10