The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 5-11
Desperate Hours (1990)
Directed by Michael Cimino
Cimino’s contrasting passions—the erotic destruction of perfect bodies, the immutable majesty of the American landscape—meet in the queasy battleground of a suburban house, belonging to a family tearing itself apart from the inside. From the opening scene, a nearly Hitchcockian game of poses in a backdrop so serene and glorious it looks like a matte painting, it’s clear that Cimino will be mixing the sacred and the profane with lusty aplomb, caring not a whit who he offends. Appallingly handsome Mickey Rourke breaks out of jail with the help of his stupefied sexpot lawyer, leaving her holding the bag the minute he’s free. He and two accomplices kidnap Anthony Hopkins and his squabbling brood in the palatial manse he no longer presides over (they’re divorcing). Cimino’s zooms and cranes around people like he’s worried they’ll shapeshift on him, revealing more and more of the beauty of every actor and location as he swivels and racks. Hopkins and Rourke are presented as cocksure nemeses, right down to their matching wool coats, wanting what the other possesses. As usual for Cimino post-Heaven’s Gate, his tone needs a horse tranquilizer and his sexual gaze is disturbing, but there’s just no arguing with his images, which are all he cared about anyway. Desperate Hours is as radiant and lovely a collection of images as any American ever produced. If they happen to add up to a living nightmare of juvenile derangement, then so be it. Cimino’s compositions were worth twice of most of his peers’. It’ll be a long time before someone this mad and smart wants to make genre films again. Scout Tafoya (October 5, 4:30pm, 7pm, 9:15pm at BAM’s Cimino retrospective)