Mascara

The movie starts with Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) driving, and she nearly runs over a man who was crossing the street. They exchange some words, but seem to take a liking to each other.

She meets up with Bert, a police superintendent; they're both dressed in formalwear. He stops at a crime scene that is particularly seedy. A dingy apartment, with a partially clothed dead woman in a bathtub full of water. The police on the scene think it was a suicide, but Bert points out it had to have been a murder. This death has no connection (that I'm aware of) to anything else in the movie, except to set the stage for the seediness to follow.

Bert and Gaby proceed to the opera, for which he has a great liking (along with white dresses). In the opera, the female lead playing Eurydice wears a sparkly white dress with lights beneath the cloth forming a large blinking red heart. Bert is absolutely captivated by the dress.

Bert insists on meeting the designer of the dress backstage, and it turns out to be Chris, the man Gaby almost ran over. Gaby and Chris become even more smitten with each other.

Bert persuades Chris to let him borrow the dress for a special friend. Chris goes along on the provision that he gets to do the dressing and undressing, thinking the friend is Gaby. Bert takes him to a well-hidden underground opera S&M club, populated by wealthy men and quite a lot of transsexuals. Performers lip-synch to opera songs. Gaby is not there, but Bert's love Pepper. A death occurs, and although Chris is innocent of it, it looks like the blame will fall on him, particularly when Bert forces Chris to make repeat visits to the club. Meanwhile, Chris and Gaby try to strengthen their relationship, which Gaby finds hard to do.

It was a pretty good movie, well-made. I'm sure the transsexual club limits its appeal, and be forewarned that there is some full-frontal male/female nudity - yikes....

I was given some old videos and this Mascara was with them, i just put It on and really enjoyed the whole Drag and Transvestite theme, with The Lovely Eva Robin's as Peppa.... watch and enjoy something a little Different from the normal every day films.

I didn't expect to see such good actors as Michael Sarrazin and Charlotte Rampling in a movie of this theme but they play the parts very well and convincingly.

For me Eva Robin's portrayal of Peppa was touching and I felt great sorrow for the character and found her strangely intriguing.

Murder mystery and a Love story with a different theme what more could you ask for?

I would say give it a chance and you will enjoy, but if you don't like the drag and transvestite theme then steer well away.

So imagine if Bob Guccione kidnapped Werner Schroeter, forced him onto a diet of magic mushrooms, and at a point of a gun and with the regular administration of scopolamine put him to work making a serial killer movie. That's Mascara.

I actually can't believe I just watched that movie. I had an odd defeated day, and I got some Mazarin Omnipollo beer in (tastes as good as it sounds) and knew I needed to see something off the chain. I hadn't figured out how far off the chain this movie was, psychologically it was like being in an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon watching this movie. In my long film watching experience it has set a new high watermark for the bizarre. Carlo Ponti famously exclaimed "What?" when he saw a film Polanski made that was then in homage called "What?". But Polanski was a mere amateur at confusion compared to Patrick Conrad, the director of Mascara.

Police superintendent Bert Sanders (Michael Sarrazin) is an opera maven, and regularly attends with his sister Gaby Hart (Charlotte Rampling). There is more than a small hint that these two have a closer relationship than is recommendable between siblings. Sanders, in his late 40s, lives in with sis, and has massive problems with sublimated desire and sexual confusion. He visits a secret underground club where leading citizens dress in black tie, and watch drag queens lip sync Strauss and Gluck as well as pop music (including a Kris Kristofferson song). There's also some highly stylised S&M going on in antechambers. He's in a chaste relationship with a transsexual girlfriend who does cabaret at the club. When she comes onto him, all hell breaks loose, the tonne of psychosexual gelignite in his head blows sky high and he spends the rest of the movie alternating between catatonia and psychosis, digging himself in deeper whilst covering his tracks and trying to stop his sister getting with the dressmaker for the local opera house.

Parts of the movie have genuine pathos and are tres trans sympatico, but others seem almost hideously exploitational. The impression comes across that Partick Conrad is messing with you with some of the twists, like an experiment in blowing the viewer's mind.

And you know Charlotte Rampling is in the midst of all this acting her skin off at points. Unbelievable. She was not afraid of appearing in off the charts projects for sure, The Flesh of the Orchid is another superb example (no way could she have pretended that she was off for a straightforward gig with that one, not when James Hadley Chase wrote it!!!).

Wanna get unhinged? Put on some Mascara baby.

An incestuous brother-sister duo! A psychotic killer who stalks transsexuals! An underground S&M club called Mister Butterfly! An opera gown with a fluorescent red heart! In its irresistible mix of outre artiness and commercial sleaze, Mascara plays as if Werner Schroeter had set out to direct an erotic thriller in the style of Joe Eszterhas.

Unthinkable in any normal universe, but Mascara is most defiantly NOT a normal film. A box-office catastrophe on its release, and still barely known outside a small clique of twisted souls, this is a cult movie waiting to happen. As deliciously warped as anything by Almodovar or John Waters, it's all the more campily compelling for being played with a straight face.

In a queer inversion of the Orpheus myth, it is Woman (a smoulderingly beautiful Charlotte Rampling) who inhabits a sunlit above-ground world of music, art and 'healthy' sexuality. (All three summed up by her affair with a hunky opera designer, Derek de Lint.) It is Man (Michael Sarrazin as her deranged sibling) who wallows in a subterranean sexual Hell of his own making.

Brief but surprisingly graphic shots treat us to leather bondage gear, chain-mail masks and the scariest Tina Turner drag act you are ever likely to see. The subtle androgyny of Rampling's persona becomes an eerie reflection of the real-life transsexuals (Berlin cabaret legend Romy Haag and Italian beauty Ewa Robins) who round out the film's cast.

And to make it that wee bit more perverse, the lurid goings-on are set to some serenely lyrical opera excerpts by Gluck, Bellini and Strauss. You'll either adore or loathe Mascara - there's no middle ground - but guaranteed you've never seen anything quite like it.

For a nominal "suspense" film, this provides precious few thrills. The romantic subplot involving wimpy, neurotic Charlotte Rampling and the less-than-compelling Derek de Lint goes nowhere. Pointless fantasy sequences are introduced, and the backstory relating to the serial killings of the local drag population is never developed.

On the plus side, the cinematography is a treat-- long moody sequences shot in a half-empty Belgian seacoast resort. And this is, after all, the film that pioneered the "Crying Game" scene-- reason enough to see it, in my book.