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The Costa-Gavras of The Confession and State of Siege is the point of departure, a dandy caricature of Godard's La Chinoise emerges along the way. The opening cranes down from a high-angled view of the Berkeley campus to capture the heiress in a freeze-frame close-up, establishing Natasha Richardson's studied blankness and meticulous nasality. Plucked out of her "sheltered environment," she finds herself inside a locked closet bludgeoned with threats and slogans, "a prisoner of war" of the Symbionese Liberation Army. (Hallucinatory fragments conjure up her subjective ordeal, slanting silhouettes in the blazing rectangle that is the door that opens into darkness.) "The revolution is happening right now, bitch, in good old, fascist Amerika!" A stark matter of staying alive so the bourgeois princess joins her captors in "the struggle," meaning motel hideouts and bank robberies. "I know the enemy. I'm the expert." Paul Schrader on the junction of survival and radicalization, as airless and unenlightening as the case warrants. The blindfold comes off and the guerrilla bumblers step into the light, the leader (Ving Rhames) cuts a leonine figure but must still go door to door asking for support. "A combat operation, not a stick-up," either way the spectacle unfolds under the stuttering eye of surveillance lenses, the heroine nervously bungles her memorized speech. William Forsythe and Frances Fisher embody the baleful comedy of curdled counterculture, admiring their own blackface disguises and the noble poverty of a Watts sanctuary. Arrest, trial, the woman within the symbol has her say. "You see, people fantasized about me so long, they thought they knew me. When I finally surfaced, real person, real story, I was inconvenient." Lumet takes a contrasting approach in the concurrent Running on Empty. Cinematography by Bojan Bazelli. With Jodi Long, Olivia Barash, Dana Delany, Marek Johnson, Kitty Swink, Peter Kowanko, and Tom O'Rourke.
--- Fernando F. Croce |