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New Rose Hotel
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In
the history of popular film, there is a curious convergence between the figure
of the femme fatale – the bombshell who seduces for power – and the threat of
nuclear war (Kiss Me Deadly [1955] is a classic example). Is this just our culture’s
overactive misogyny, or is the connection more revealing?
Laura Mulvey sees it as a modern repetition of the Pandora myth, triggering not only
the negative associations of women with destructiveness, but more importantly
the possibly liberating theme of female curiosity – the heroine as investigator
and troublemaker in a man’s world.
Mulvey
and Ferrara share a passion for the key film in this tradition, Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), of which New
Rose Hotel is a particularly inspired and tortured remake. Once again, an
operator in the criminal world (Willem Dafoe’s X) pushes his lover (Asia
Argento’s Sandii) into an affair with a powerful man (Yoshitaka Amano’s
Hiroshi).
Once
again, a sinister, older figure (Christopher Walken’s Fox, a way, way out
performance) pulls the strings. And once again our unlovely hero is wracked
with projections arising from guilt and paranoia. But Sandii is a more
provocative heroine than Ingrid Bergman, and her mysterious fate plunges New Rose Hotel into a vortex of poetic
disintegration.
This
is a film that, an hour in, seems to break down and restart, splutteringly;
what was previously merely enigmatic rapidly becomes cosmically inscrutable.
Rarely
has the auto-destruction of the cinematic apparatus been so thrilling as in New Rose Hotel.
Alongside The Blackout (1997), it is Ferrara’s most openly experimental work.
MORE Ferrara: The Addiction, Bad Lieutenant, China Girl, Ms. 45, 'R Xmas, Pasolini, Mary, King of New York, The Funeral, Dangerous Game © Adrian Martin June 2003 |
