Illusion and reality mingle in DANGEROUS GAME, refracted through the prism of the cinema, and they're both miserable.
Leaving his family in New York, director Eddie Israel begins work in California on "Mother of Mirrors", an improvised series of scenes from a miserable marriage. One star, Sarah Jennings (Madonna), is a TV celebrity with a burning need to legitimize herself. The other is Frank Burns (James
Russo), an intense, difficult method actor who's fallen from commercial grace and pretends to neither know nor care that his career is dangerously close to ruin.
The pretentious and unpleasant "Mother of Mirrors" revolves around Claire and Russell, desperate suburbanites on the threshold of middle age. Their spiritually bankrupt existence is threatened when Claire finds religion and abandons the drugs and swinging sex that have defined their lives.
Claire/Sarah and Russell/Frank rage and bicker and claw; their director alternately prods and soothes them. "Mother of Mirrors" exposes him (perhaps for the first time, perhaps not), lets out the repressed bully and liar and cheat who lie beneath the surface of hip director Eddie Israel, all in
the name of looking for art and truth in the cinema.
Eddie's wife (Nancy Ferrara) pays a surprise visit to Los Angeles with their son, and nearly catches Eddie in bed with Sarah. Soon after, her father dies and they return to New York for the funeral. Israel confesses his compulsive infidelity and asks forgiveness; his wife is understandably
enraged by both the revelation and the timing, and sends him packing. Frank and Sarah have also been sleeping together, and their on set relationship becomes increasingly volatile, apparently culminating in the scene in which Frank-as-Russell rapes Sarah-as-Claire on camera.
The worst is yet to come: in a scene in which Russell threatens to kill Claire, Frank points the gun at Sarah's head with maniacal ferocity. He pulls the trigger, and the screen goes black as a shot rings out.
New York-based director Abel Ferrara, for years best known to horror buffs and fans of knock-em-dead action for such films as MS.45 and KING OF NEW YORK, scored a surprising succes d'estime in 1992 with his grim fable of sin and brutal redemption, BAD LIEUTENANT. It begged the encore question:
would Ferrara return to his trademark style of filmmaking, in which content took a back seat to sleek, kinetic, seductively lush form? Or would he press on in BAD LIEUTENANT's sandpaper-on-flesh vein, staking his claim to recognition as a director with serious moral concerns, one whose work
belonged in art houses, not grind houses? DANGEROUS GAME (originally called SNAKE EYES, under which title it premiered at the Venice Film Festival) was one ambivalent answer, built around a venerable art movie concept--the film-within-a-film as microcosmic spiritual maelstrom--but denying
moviegoers the usual refined pleasures of such self-referential exercises. BODY SNATCHERS, Ferrara's glossy remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS--finished before DANGEROUS GAME but not released until 1994--was the other.
DANGEROUS GAME rejects the brittle cleverness inherent in the is-it-real-or-is-it-celluloid conceit. There are few celebrity cameos, no echoes of famous Hollywood stories to recognize and identify; it's not Billy Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD or Francois Truffaut's DAY FOR NIGHT or even Karel
Reisz's THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. DANGEROUS GAMES is a body blow of a movie, an art movie for guys from Brooklyn: not so rarified that they feel intimidated, filled with emotional gutter wallowing so they know it's not supposed to be fun. DANGEROUS GAME has nothing if not the courage of its
convictions: it dares to be unlikable, dares to make every single character manipulative, narrow minded and defiantly selfish, dares to dare viewers to even try to enjoy themselves. Like Robert Altman's THE PLAYER (and Hollywood novels since Nathanael West's "Day of the Locust"), its portrait of
the moviemaking business could hardly be more unkind. But while the ironic THE PLAYER delivers wit and a "happy" ending, DANGEROUS GAME is a miserable revel in poisonous behind-the-scenes goings on. Harvey Keitel's anonymous director (though he has a name in the credits, no-one ever uses it) is
the equally nameless bad lieutenant with a camera and a vision: he's still going to hell and determined to take everyone down with him.
DANGEROUS GAME contains more to interest longtime Ferrara enthusiasts than casual viewers; its apparently autobiographical elements are evident only to those familiar with his work and persona. Keitel's character dresses and speaks like Ferrara, and his film recalls BAD LIEUTENANT (in which
Keitel starred) in tone and theme, if not in story; in one scene, "Mother of Mirrors" is slated SNAKE EYES. The casting of Ferrara's wife as Eddie Israel's betrayed spouse is particularly provocative, in a maliciously gossipy sort of way. (Extensive profanity, nudity, violence, adult situations, sexual situations, substance abuse.) leave a comment
