Wild Side (Cammell, 1995): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm
ICA introduction:
The perfect companion piece to Performance, Donald Cammell’s swan song is an edgy unpredictable pulp noir centred around crime, money, sex, power games and four outstanding acting performances. Bruno (Christopher Walken), the world’s most notorious money launderer, is being set up for a sting by undercover agent Tony (Steven Bauer) posing as his chauffeur. When Alex (Anne Heche), an international banker moonlighting as a call girl enters Bruno’s world, both Bruno and Tony see opportunity – as does Bruno’s estranged wife Virgina (Joan Chen). Masquerading as a crime thriller, Cammell’s final film shifts unpredictably between hard-bitten drama, sensuous lesbian love story and absurd black comedy to deliver an incendiary mix of mind games, sexual liaisons and ever-shifting loyalties as the four characters navigate an increasingly complex and irrelevant plot. The performances, particularly Walken’s as the nervy, eccentric Bruno are larger than life, and Heche, the emotional centre of the film, is outstanding as the intermittently tough, vulnerable, and uncertain Alex. On its UK release in June 2000, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote, ‘an original and exhilarating thriller, capriciously intelligent, with experimentalism and verve…an arresting work from an important and distinctive director.’Re-edited against his wishes by its American producers Cammell removed his name from the project and shortly after committed suicide, but a posthumous ‘director’s cut’ adding more than twenty minutes of material and restoring Cammell’s original vision was produced by Tartan Films in the UK screening to enthusiastic reviews. Thought to be lost, two 35mm prints of this director’s cut were recently uncovered, and this screening – the first for more than two decades – is from one of these two surviving prints.
Observer review:
Like
William Burroughs, British film-maker Donald Cammell was the scion of
an immensely rich family (the Cammell Laird shipbuilders) who reacted
violently against his respectable background. Both lived outrageously
unconventional lives of drugs, orgies and diabolical dabbling, and
produced extravagant, deliberately provocative works concerned, often
mystically, with bisexuality and the perverted exercise of power.
Unlike Burroughs, who killed his wife, Cammell killed himself, dying
in Hollywood in 1996 at the age of 62. Cammell's first film, Performance , co-directed with Nicolas Roeg,
is one of the most remarkable to emerge from a British studio and
encapsulates the culture of Swinging London at its most seductively
corrupt. He was forced by Warner Brothers to re-edit it drastically
and he only completed three more pictures - the SF curiosity Demon
Seed (Julie Christie impregnated by a computer), the mystic thriller
White of the Eye (serial killer loose in the Arizona desert) and Wild
Side, which was chopped up by its producers and sent straight to
cable TV in 1995. It was the contemptuous treatment of this last film
that proved the last straw, as it were, for Cammell, but he was still
hoping to regain control of it when he shot himself. Now his editor
and friend, Frank Mazzola, with the help of Channel 4 and Tartan
Films, has restored the director's cut, and it is being shown under
the somewhat tautologous title of Donald Cammell's Wild Side. It
could as easily be called 'Christopher Walken on the Wild Side', for
in that most volatile of American actors Cammell found a perfect
exponent of his dangerous art. Walken plays an out-of-control
financial crook, Bruno, the world's biggest money launderer, on whom
the federal authorities have planted a psychotic undercover agent,
Tony (Steven Bauer), as his chauffeur. A beautiful Los Angeles
banker, Alex Lee (Anne Heche), is moonlighting as a $1,000-a-night
call-girl to pay off her mortgage. She services the sexually
voracious Bruno, is raped by Tony and then blackmailed by the Feds.
Walken sends his Chinese wife Virginia (Joan Chen) to Alex's bank as
part of a gigantic scam and the two women fall passionately in love. The film is from start to finish absolutely crazy, full of baroque
dialogue and over-the-top performances. On one level it's a power
game between an unlikely unhinged quartet, on another it's an orgy in
serial form. It is often queasily risible, as when the financier
prepares to bugger his chauffeur in front of Alex to demonstrate his
superiority, and makes the intended victim roll the condom on for him
as he smokes a cigar. Yet like all Cammell's work, Wild Side is oddly
compelling - riveting in the sense that you feel nailed to a post as
you watch it. The editing is disconcerting, the interiors
claustrophobic, and Cammell uses to considerable emblematic effect
the township of Long Beach, where the immaculate three-funnelled
Queen Mary is isolated in an industrial seaside wasteland. In a
curious reference back to the London of the 1960s, the heroine's
nasty boss is called Rachman, presumably after the property racketeer
involved in the Profumo scandal.
Philip French
Here (and above) is the trailer.
