- Dangerous Game
Last week, I was happy to finally see Abel Ferrara’s film Welcome to New York, a biopic about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a member of France’s Socialist Party and managing director of the International Monetary Fund. As Ben Sachs notes in his review, this is the first Ferrara film to play in Chicago theaters since 1998, so even though I had a fairly ambivalent response to the film, I still appreciate being able to see the film, period. (That said, there’s some controversy over whether or not the version currently in exhibition is in fact the definitive version, meaning the one the director wants us to see, but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers.) As a director, Ferrara means different things to different people. To J. Hoberman, he’s a “cine scuzz-meister” and the last great proprietor of the pre-Giuliani New York milieu; to Nicole Brenez, he’s an innovator along the lines of Orson Welles and Nicholas Ray, someone who radically reconstructs genre archetypes and levels the barriers between avant-garde and narrative forms. He’s worked in grimy exploitation, sci-fi, psychodrama, crime thriller, porn, and supernatural horror, and his best films tend to be an amalgamation of all that and more. Dealing in moral ambiguity and a carefree, essentially detached view of cinematic realism, Ferrara’s films appear unintentionally comical and deficient to the uninitiated, but such deliberate obfuscations are what make his work so vital. One must approach a Ferrara film, however inane and seemingly foolish it may seem, with the same feeling and incertitude demanded by life itself, a tough ask for audiences in an age of increasingly diagrammatic, ready-made cinema. You can find my five favorite Abel Farrara films after the jump.
- Body Snatchers (1993) Collaborating with fellow trash cinema iconoclasts Larry Cohen and Stuart Gordon, Ferrara made one of the best studio horror film of the 90s with this adaptation of the famous Jack Finney novel. Compared to previous adaptations, Ferrara’s film strays furthest from the source material, but the sense of paranoia and anxiety is nevertheless palpable, ably mixed in with the director’s pet themes of conformity and nihilism. Like his gangster movie The Funeral, this has a stunningly ambiguous conclusion that leaves the viewer with the same sense of unease experienced by the characters.
