|
Terminal Pirandello, mort de l'auteur. Can cinema transform mortality, or merely record it? Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders attempt to find out in the most dolorous way possible, a pact between disintegrating tough-guy and reluctant oedipal son. The prologue sets up the excruciating timbre: Morning at Ray's SoHo flat, in bed he reaches for a smoke after nearly coughing up a lung, shaves and mumbles about a dream ("a goddamn musical... in Venezuela"), in the middle ground Susan Ray stretches on a yoga mat and on the foreground couch lays a jet-lagged Wenders. Lecture at Vassar, glimpses of The Lusty Men (Mitchum limping through the empty arena, crawling under the old house), "a man who wants to bring himself altogether before he dies." Projectors and celluloid strips strewn across the apartment (We Can't Go Home Again still needs editing), intruding microphones and clapboards. At the center of all this self-reflexive paraphernalia is the rawness of Ray's cancerous condition, painfully skeletal under the scrutiny of bleary video cameras yet still envisioning one final scabrous, romantic gesture, "to experience death without dying." A working-out of voyeuristic shame and morbid hero-worship for Wenders, for his American friend the chance to desperately write his own epitaph. Off-Broadway Kafka and hospital-bed Lear, as agonizing as it's meant to be. "Once more, our reality was stronger than the fiction that we wanted to turn it into." Ray's ferocious farewell is a pitilessly sustained close-up of his eye-patched skull raging into the afterlife, the posthumous aerial view of the Chinese junk on the Hudson is a nod perhaps to the opening of They Live by Night. With Ronee Blakley, Tom Farrell, Ed Lachman, and Gerry Bamman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |