Paganini

Klaus Kinski assoluto. The continuous flurry kicks off with lips parting in gigantic close-up (Citizen Kane, why not), the ostentatiously galvanic violinist on his deathbed still refusing to apologize for being "a threat to society." He wears black shoe polish on his hair and eyebrows and skulks onto the stage as a 19th-century Mick Jagger, ravishing the audience simply by taking a bow. (He saws promiscuously at his instrument and maidens pull up heavy gowns to diddle themselves.) The top-hatted drama king wanders through pastoral fields and darkened chambers turned into Chardin canvases by natural light, and expires as he lived, at the center of a whirlwind. His catalog of carnal conquests includes Napoleon's little sister, disembodied voices razz and swoon in his wake ("You're so ugly... A gift from God... He's an animal"). Of the altars erected by megalomaniac geniuses to themselves (Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, Dylan's Renaldo and Clara), Kinski's may be the most purely instinctual. The editing often suggests an advanced stage of epilepsy, childlike slow-motion is the presiding effect, the raw imagery vacillates from Emmanuelle sequel to Barry Lyndon outtake. Diaphanous and bedeviled, lurching and engorged, it glows as it splits your skull. In the foreground is an acid burlesque of the anguished-artist biopic, in the background an impressionistic home movie with the auteur's barely-legal inamorata (Debora Caprioglio) and son (Nikolai Kinski), the two halves wrenched together into a portrait of the aesthete in Dalí's "permanent state of intellectual erection." The endless carriage ride (cf. Russell's Mahler), a coin for the foundling with fiddle. Kinski's raging shrine implodes as it must, leaving the sublime excruciation of a passionate madman alone with his fear and ecstasy. "Music comes from fire..." With Dalila Di Lazzaro, Tosca D'Aquino, Eva Grimaldi, and Bernard Blier.