tieman64
"This is what you get for making house calls." - Bill Hartford (Eyes Wide Shut) Abel Ferrara directs "R Xmas". Ignored upon release in the West, the film would top several "best of the year" polls in France, and would be heavily praised by several Cahiers Du Cinema writers.The plot? Dreo de Matteo and Lillo Brancato play a Latino husband and wife team living in New York City. They lead a double life, alternating between their upscale Manhattan apartment (eerily similar to the Hartford's apartment in "Eyes Wide Shut"; did Kubrick's location scouts photocopy a similar place?), and a run-down inner city rent-a-room, where they cut, wrap and push cocaine. Like "Eyes Wide Shut", these two apartments - or halves of the couple's life - occupy the same Mobius Strip. The couple wine and dine and fraternise with sophistos on one hand, but slum it and hang out with street urchins, hoodlums and gangsters on the other. They push to have the best toys, gifts and Ivy League education for their young daughter, but must engage in all manners of debauchery to maintain her sanitised life. Privilege, then, is seen to come at a cost.Much of the film contrasts the couple's provincial dialects and street slang with their pretence at having escaped the streets. They're not social climbers, or even social pretenders, so much as agents shuttlecocking back and forth between poverty and yuppie money. The film's tone does the same, sleazy and vulgar on one hand, but tender and poignant on the other. Matteo and Brancato, a couple of unconventional, riveting and well cast actors, themselves exude warmth, selflessly concerned about their little family unit, even as they spew obscenities and cut coke.Like "Eyes Wide Shut", Christmas is the setting. Drug trading appears to be qualitatively no different from any other business, transactions are the raison d'etre of all interactions and the film delights in clashing its wholesome festive ambiance with B movie grit. The point's not that our lead couple lead a "double life", but that everything has a repugnant underside (hence the "R Xmas" slang title - the X rated, the shameful), the two "sides" of the Mobius Strip inextricable, day facilitating night and vice versa. Shades of Lynch ("Inland Empire", "Mulholland Drive", "Lost Highway"), Cronenberg ("Existenz", "A History of Violence", "Eastern Promises"), Pasolini ("Salo"?), Godard ("Weekend" et al) and Kubrick (everything post "Clockwork").The "Eyes Wide Shut" parallels continue. Ferrara's film, like Kubrick's, is wholly preoccupied with costs. Ferrara mirrors the "designed scarcity" of consumer goods (trendy dolls, toys, goods) with the couple's in-house drug market. And just as the couple's product ruins the lives of those on the streets, so to does this outside violence leak back into their wannabe-bourgeois lives. It's not that the couple can't cut themselves off from the streets – their aim - but that they're not wealthy enough yet to do so. Their daughter will, though, mother and father's violence like a perverse Christmas gift to her. She's destined for cosy isolation.The film is somewhat autobiographical; Ferrara was a notorious crack-head for over a decade. Unlike Kubrick, though, he focuses on a smaller slice of the social strata: the lower and wannabe-bourgeois classes. The film's less interested in power as a a kind of established social framework than it is in B movie hysteria, which plays to Ferrara's strengths.Stylistically the film differs from early Ferrara. In interviews Ferrara states that its bizarre lighting and camera work was an unintentional result or byproduct of the film's small budget and rushed shoot, which necessitated the use of simple long shots, less coverage than usual and an almost documentary look. Ferrara also chooses to shoot bilingual dialogue (Spanish presented without subtitles) and refuses to juice up his film's casual tempo with thriller conventions. The film manages the rare task of neither condemning the drug trade or romanticising/poeticizing it, thanks largely to Matteo and Brancato. Their characters are pragmatic, vulgarly earnest, but there is sentimentality in their Christmas dream to acquire a doll for their daughter. Hard work, love, family, sacrifice and other treacly all-American values are espoused, but the film undermines even as it evokes the "Christmas spirit".As with all of Ferrara's films, the best moments are those in which nothing much happens: Matteo and Brancato looking at each other, driving in silence, distant shots of powder pushers pushing product or daughters walking with their fathers. What's good about "R Xmas", and what typically separates late Ferrara from early Ferrara, is that almost the entire film is similarly underplayed. "R Xmas" also features some moody nighttime and low-light photography, though such an aesthetic is beginning to be supplanted by the ether-real of digital cameras. The film features another horrendous performance by Ice-T.Some have criticised the film for analogising the commercialisation of illegal drugs and Christmas. The idea is that parallels between consumerism/materialism and cocaine dealing are trite, and that while depicting the narcotics trade as merely another capitalist avenue for enrichment is not necessarily "not correct", it is also not true that "trade" is inherently damaging. This is a whole other issue – the underside of liberal democracy and "money" itself (you can drag simple physics/biology into this as well: money is essentially energy, subject to entropy and thermodynamic laws) - and one which strikes to the core of how we run and misunderstand our own lives and actions, but Ferrara is uninterested, and is more a madcap neo-neo-Realist than didactic filmmaker.The film begins and ends with text crawls about NYC mayors David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani, epitomising Manhattan's evolution from seductive gutter to Disneyfied, gentrified tourist attraction. Matteo and Brancato are of the former; they're daughter's Mickey Mouse Club through and through.8.5/10 – See Olivier Assayas' "Demonlover", "Boarding Gate" and "Summer Hours". Worth two viewings.
jim-314
Ferrara does not know how to make an uninteresting movie. Whatever you think of the content of his films, everything he does is a stylish, riveting exercise in visual story telling. This movie is no exception. There's surprisingly little dialogue, but what there is sings with a sense of modern city life. The aural and visual atmosphere of New York City, both upscale and downscale, is rich and multi-layered, and the characters seem like people you've seen on the street, or in stores, or in clubs, many many times. I don't know how "real" the action of this movie might be, but it seems as real and believable to me as anything I've seen on screen in a good long while. This is the perfect holiday movie for 21st century America, and a near-ideal expression of the meaning of modern Christmas.
