Dangerous Game (Ferrara, 1993): Nickel Cinema, 6.30 & 9pm
Chicago Reader reviews: A gut-wrenching movie, and probably the director’s most personal. It’s a corrosive ode to the filmmaking process that manages to find beauty and wonder in some truly ugly scenarios. The film’s movie-within-a-movie conceit offers jarring lapses into documentary style and video formatting, informing the volatile atmosphere created by Ferrara’s stand-in Harvey Keitel, perhaps the director’s most important onscreen collaborator. As the critic Camille Nevers wrote, this is “the film in which [Ferrara] is ultimately not just foreman as well as architect but also active spectator and implicit and central actor.” Drew Hunt
Concept movies are rarely as galvanizing as this deliberately disorienting 1993 movie-within-a-movie. Some scenes seem improvised or even documentary, some are impossible to relegate to a single level of fictional reality. Yet there’s a clear story line in which Harvey Keitel plays movie director Eddie Israel and Madonna plays Sarah Jennings, a celebrity recommended for a lead role in his latest production by her on- and offscreen allure, star status in another medium, and capital. Much of the movie Israel’s making (and Dangerous Game) exposes Madonna/Jennings to emotional and physical intrusions that are engineered by Keitel/Israel, though ultimately director Abel Ferrara calls the shots. This grueling, multifaceted drama about (and by) a filmmaker whose MO includes severely testing the sanity and loyalty of his actors complicates the significance of the casting of Madonna–who also produced–even if you believe a woman’s complicity in her own exploitation is a feminist gesture. Lisa Alspector
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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