neff@ihuxf.UUCP (09/11/83)
Random thoughts on a movie: "The Moon in the Gutter" is the second film by the French director Jean-Jacques Beinex, the director of "Diva." This movie was totally decimated by the critics at the Cannes Film Festival and by most critics in the U.S., but since I enjoyed "Diva" so much I had to see "The Moon in the Gutter" just out of curiousity. The story revolves around a man, played by Gerard Depardieu, who frequents sleazy water front bars in hope of finding the man who raped his sister, which caused her to later commit suicide. Nastassja Kinski plays Loretta, the beautiful woman that Depardieu meets and becomes obsessed with. The motivation of the characters is never really made clear. Why, for example, would the apparently well off Loretta spend so much time in the squalor of the waterfront? This is a movie where substance and reason take a backseat to style and images. Beinex goes to excess in practically every scene. There are a lot of long dramatic pauses during conservations and scenes of people staring off into space apparently lost in deep thought. Every scene is designed to be visually stunning and the film is very well photographed, but many times a scene will get so pretentious that the audience couldn't help but laugh. One of the scenes that sticks in my mind takes place at the dock where Depardieu works. A hydraulic device has sprung a tiny leak which causes a fellow worker to be slowly crushed under some pipes. Depardieu tightens his hand over the leak, but the pressure is so great that it bursts a small hole through his hand. The scene gets very dark and all you see is the hydraulic fluid spraying in a tight stream. The stream becomes a laser beam cutting vertically across the darkened screen. The beam rotates to the horizontal and becomes a light shining under a door into a dark room which turns out to be Depardieu's hospital room. The scene was totally unnecessary but it did demonstrate a lot of imagination. Beinex refuses to do anything simply or subtly. The film is terribly self indulgent. With all its pretensions and excesses the thing that bothers me the most about this movie is the fact that I LIKED IT. I was most likely alone in the audience with that opinion; people started walking out after about half an hour. I admit that I had to laugh at a lot of the scenes for being so ridiculously overstated, but I was never bored and found the film to be, if not dramatically, at least visually always interesting. Beinex did get carried away with himself, but I had the feeling that he had a lot of fun making this film with its weird lighting and bizarre camera work. This film is definitely a personal "guilty pleasure" and I would never think of recommending it to anyone.