Reborn

I was the producer of the completion of this film and have the credit of Producer on the print. Bigas Lunas has a unique and powerful style, letting Hopper go fairly wild here, but within the confines of Bigas's deeply felt spirituality. The film is full of unforgettable moments and images, many so vivid that they can change our remembrance of what is real. The film moves from Houston with Hopper in a revivalist church, a minister losing his faith. The film moves to Spain, where a young woman experiences an unusual stigmata-like experience that clearly sets her as an affirmation of Catholic reality. Beautiful, disturbing and I hope, worth seeing.

This was a complete obscurity for me when I chanced upon it on the weekly TV guide but, with that cast (Dennis Hopper, Michael Moriarty, Francisco Rabal) and director (Bigas Luna), I decided to check it out. As it turned out, it's a bizarre and wildly uneven religious satire (with some mild horror/thriller elements added towards the end) but a handful of powerful moments make it worth watching nevertheless. In short, it deals with an introverted Italian woman who suffers from stigmata attacks and is invited by a flamboyant American televangelist (Hopper) to appear on his show; the ensuing repercussions include an unheralded miracle cure during a mass rally and her falling in love with her "captor" (Moriarty, giving his typically offbeat characterization) after a traumatic first sexual encounter in a hotel room - in itself, a very disturbing and blackly comic sequence. The rushed ending, featuring sympathetic aide-turned-villain Rabal chasing Moriarty and the woman as Hopper flips out at his headquarters is clumsy and incoherent but the disjointed whole is held together somewhat by the constant and effectively unnerving (this being the 1980s, would it be otherwise?) synthesizer-based music score.

From the first frame, the fancy gyrating helicopter, circling a tall building bearing, a big lit up cross, and an encapsulating music score, we pretty know what to expect in the ensuing ninety minutes. Reborn is beautiful, mesmerizing, a little shocking, intriguing, and engaging, and again, beautiful in it's whole duration of weirdness, and style. Only some would be able to follow the story, where a lot of others will be trying to put the dots together. I am in this category. But it's a more fun way, to enjoy it, then the other. It's just a especial movie, one that's very inspiring. As for the performances, you can pretty much see Hopper spouting out his beliefs in effective shouts. And his trademark pointing gesture. Moriarty fares better as a touched party, who's girlfriend, is showing some quite, scary behavior. At one point, in reference to one shock scene, you could say, he's in, but not out. Moriarty always brings so much heart to every character, I consider him to be the greatest actors out there. The movie does drag a little towards the end, but just see this movie once, for the experience, Amen.

Bigas Luna is a truly original filmmaker, and this is a very strange, but very interesting movie. It's kind of a second-coming movie, only very different from what you'd expect. Michael Moriarty and Dennis Hopper are both great. I'd mostly recommend it to fans of strange low-key horror.