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The wallflower who shatters the wall, or: I Was a Teenage Medusa. It glides from a volleyball game to La danse des nymphes in the locker room, the slow-mo reverie of Brian De Palma's camera is interrupted as Carrie (Sissy Spacek) is hit by her first menstruation. "You're a woman now," proclaims Mama (Piper Laurie) before whomping the dismayed misfit with the Holy Bible. Hysteria, hormonal as well as evangelical, is ingrained in the mise en scène: Carrie in the closet is Gish in Broken Blossoms, an overhead shot gives way to a close-up of a St. Sebastian figurine with mysteriously luminous eyes. Pelted with taunts and tampons, she quietly cultivates telekinetic powers while her tormentors plot a bogus prom-night coronation. Nancy Allen and Amy Irving are the high-school fairies, one wicked and the other nice, John Travolta and William Katt are the lunkheads in their machinations. A spiraling constellation of cardboard stars, a dilation of Marnie's family trauma and crimson suffusions. "Take off that dress! We'll burn it together and pray for forgiveness." "Oh Mama..." Stephen King's novel outlines a world ringed with abuse, De Palma visualizes it with vast reserves of pervy humor and ominous effulgence. The showiest maneuver—a continuous pan-crane-zoom around the dance floor that locates the bucket of pig's blood above the stage—segues into the most gleeful montage, with the villainess licking her lips as her ruse lands with an ejaculatory splat. Not to be outdone, the drenched heroine cracks her chrysalis spectacularly and brings down the temple into a split-screen volcano. Back home, Mama brandishes Abraham's knife and discovers ecstasy with a dozen kitchen utensils sticking out of her torso. The ethereal and the grotesque, voluptuousness and brimstone, the inquisitive artist and the baroque showman, everything in combustible balance. Keats' "The Living Hand" figures in the stinger, a vision of soft-focus harmony denied harshy, uproariously. Cinematography by Mario Tosi. With Betty Buckley, P.J. Soles, and Priscilla Pointer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |