| MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS : Paul Schrader's 'Cat People' (1982) [5/10] |
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| Sunday, 26 March 2006 | |
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Stylishly glossy, unashamedly carnal, Cat People is ultimately a rather daft update of Jacques Tourneur's Val Lewton-produced 1942 semi-classic of the same title. For good or ill, Schrader puts his own distinctive imprint on DeWitt Bodeen's original story - via Alan Ormsby's screenplay - not least in his decision to relocate the action from New York to New Orleans. It's a geographical displacement very similar to that in a later example of over-cooked eighties Hollywood supernaturalism, Alan Parker's Angel Heart (1987) which was based on William Hjortsberg's entirely Manhattan-set novel. Both films purchase a rather cheap brand of exoticism from their choice of Louisiana settings: sweaty climate; crumbly architecture; overheard snatches of joual French; rumblings of voodoo, etc. Newcomers are often disoriented by the city's atmosphere(s) - and doe-eyed, twentyish, boyishly gamine beauty Irina (Nastassja Kinski) takes time to adjust after moving in with her older brother Paul. Though very close as children, the pair were brought up separately following the deaths of their circus-performers parents and haven't seen each other since. Paul seems more than usually delighted to see his long-lost sister: indeed, his excitement seems to have an incestuously sexual edge. Wandering the city, Irina is irresistibly drawn to the municipal zoo and, with help from friendly zoologist Oliver (John Heard), gets a job in the establishment's gift-shop. Irina is particularly drawn to the big-cat 'exhibits' - the newest arrival being a black panther, captured in a sleazy hotel-room after mauling a prostitute. Paul, meanwhile, has gone missing. Could the two events somehow be linked? The title itself does rather give the game away: Paul and Irina are eventually revealed to be descendants from an ancient (African?) tribe who, through generations of sexual contact with big cats, somehow became a genetic hybrid of the two species. Though ostensibly human in form, these 'cat people' transform into lethal panthers if they have sex with anyone outside their own 'kind'. Paul has known all about this for years, and has become unbalanced by his need to have what he regards as 'normal' intercourse - with his sister. Irina herself is a relative innocent: she has always instinctively resisted sexual contact, but must now come to terms with her wild 'nature' as she finds herself increasingly attracted to nice-guy Oliver. This sexual shapeshifting is a rather unlikely premise for a big-budget Hollywood release - it seemed rather less distractingly implausible in the 1942 version which, for various reasons, had to convey Irina's plight by means of shadowy insinuation and implication. Schrader, by contrast, has a much bigger budget with which to operate, and also a rather more liberal cultural climate. Where Tourneur left almost everything to the viewer's imagination, Schrader puts pretty much everything up on the screen, including some state-of-the-art special-effects transformation sequences. The brother-sister angle is, meanwhile, new to the 1982 version - and the heady incest element (McDowell becoming bug-eyed with passion when anywhere near his sibling) only serves to overload a story which, even if it were simply about Irina and Oliver, would already be pretty difficult to swallow. Schrader deserves plenty of credit, then, for keeping things intriguing and absorbing for as long as he does - including one startling sequence of gory violence when a smart-alec zoo-worker (Ed Begley Jr!) has his arm ripped out of his socket after getting too close to one of his chargers. But when, at roughly one hour in, Irina tries to flee the city - impulsively buying a train ticket for as far away as her money will take her (this pointedly turns out to be Richmond, Virginia) - the script loses its bearings in disastrous fashion. In a sensually trippy, desertine dream sequence (reminiscent of Exorcist II, and prefiguring Schrader's own Exorcist prequel) Paul appears to Irina and delivers a slab of expository dialogue about how the 'cat people' came about, and the terrible sexual 'curse' that they have handed down through the generations. On waking, Irina abruptly returns to Louisiana and no longer seems to be the same person as before : from kittenish, naive charmer, she's now a steely-eyed dominatrix. The scene in which she has kinky sex with Oliver, tied to the bed with ropes in order to restrain her inner panther, makes no sense at all - and leads to a messy climax which hints, in rather unsavoury fashion, at bestiality. By this stage the rather flimsy plot has become weighed down by Schrader's mythological, allegorical ambitions, with scant regard paid to plot-logic and character-development - hats off to Heard for making sense out of a particularly thankless role. What might in other hands (John Carpenter??) have been a distinctive, fairytale-inspired, atmospheric adult horror piece becomes instead an overwrought, pretentious, po-faced exploration of outre sexuality - complete with a thuddingly overpowering synth-rock soundtrack from Giorgio Moroder that's dated particularly badly in the intervening two and a half decades. In the end, the film doesn't know whether it wants to chill or arouse its audience - and tries to to do both at the same time. As with the physiology of the feline-human hybrids at its centre, it's an awkward fit - no matter how sleek the surfaces may appear. Neil Young 26th March, 2006 CAT PEOPLE : [5/10] : USA 1982 : Paul SCHRADER : 118 mins (BBFC timing) seen at IMAX cinema*, NMPFT, Bradford, (UK), 7th March 2006 - public show - Bradford Film Festival (Malcolm McDowell retrospective)
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