Siesta

Siesta is a most atmospheric film, almost dreamlike, you feel the Spanish heat while Ellen Barkin is stumbling through the pictures in confused despair. She wakes up lying on the roll way of an airport, not knowing where she is or how she got there. Her red dress is full of blood and she starts running... From there, an odyssey begins for her, with strongly impressive scenes of -not only sexual- passion. A bit confusing for the first time watching because of all the flashbacks, when you watch the film a second time you can really enjoy it. Many stunning actors, who appear to join Ellen without really helping her situation, only dragging her deeper in confusion. A surprising end, all of a sudden you begin to understand what happened to Ellen and why she lost her memory. This film left such a strong impression on me that i still recommend it to all of my friends and other movie fans.

I watched this movie again recently after not seeing it for about 10 years, and it's held up very well. I remember after seeing it the first time, that I kept saying to myself, "What?", but upon seeing it a couple more times, I figured it out.

Overall pretty good, kind of a mind-bending mild thriller. It looks as if the director trimmed out some of the original movie that might have helped fill in a gap or two here.

Nonetheless, it is an interesting film with good acting, particularly with Ellen Barkin. Interesting supporting cast, too, that includes Julian Sands, Isabella Rossellini, Jodie Foster and Grace Jones.

7 out of 10. My favorite dialogue in the film: "I'm your guardian angel", to which the response is, "I'm almost tempted to believe you."

Claire "On a Dare" wakes up by an airport runway wearing a red dress. She's dirty and bruised. She has no idea where she is or how she got there, or even what day it is, but she does remember who she is and retains most of her memories. She strips off her dress by a creek to wash off it and herself what seems to be blood, and sunbathes nude to dry off - sustained full-frontal nudity within the first two minutes of the movie, jeepers!

I'm reminded of a line from the novel The Screaming Mimi by Frederic Brown, "There's murder before the story proper starts, and murder after it ends; the actual story begins with a naked woman and ends with one, which is a good opening and a good ending, but everything between isn't nice."

Claire, finding the blood washes off her thinks someone else must be dead. Discovering and remembering that she is in Spain, she thinks she may have killed her ex-lover Augustine, or his new wife.

Claire had been due to skydive without a parachute into a dormant (or artificial?) volcano covered with a net to catch her, that will be on fire. If she misses the net, or hits it after it has burned too much, she's dead in Death Valley. Receiving a letter from her ex-lover who doesn't want her to do the stunt, she flies to Spain to try to get him to return to her, despite her having been married to her promoter for six years or so.

Claire has some strange adventures, sometimes pretty horrible. A fat taxi driver with tin dentures offers to help, but his price is sex, or rape. An eccentric brawling artist tries to help her, and doesn't seem to have any motive other than "the good you give out is returned to you."

Sprinkled throughout are shots of Claire skydiving; like Roger Ebert, I couldn't tell if this was "fantasy [...] memory, or anticipation" not that it makes much difference. Throughout "falling" gets mentioned a lot in other ways. Claire, in a Catholic church says she feels like she is falling, the artist talks about how the only kind of falling that isn't failing is falling in love, etc.

One thing the title seems to refer to is a siesta Claire's ex-lover takes in a small building near a church, where they perhaps used to have sex.

Bruce Joel Rubin wrote a screenplay in the 1970s that was considered one of the best unproduceable scripts. This movie seems in a way an attempt to make it, though it is based on a novel. This movie didn't really do it for me, and perhaps time would be better spent reading the novel. Rubin's screenplay was produced a few years after this movie, and turned out quite well.

This is an odd movie. In places there doesn't seem to be much of a plot, and many of the characters are....well, odd. Essentially, the story is about Ellen Barkin's character, Claire, attempting to get to an airport in Spain in time to return to the US for a daredevil stunt she's supposed to perform. Why the hurry? Well, she came to Spain to look up an old boyfriend.... I don't want to give too much away. Claire's attempts to get to the airport run into obstacles...peculiar obstacles. In places the movie has the same frustrating feel to it as a dream in which one continually tries to do something, but somehow nothing quite works out. There's a supporting cast with some big names in it, but just keep your eyes on Ellen Barkin, as those other characters come and go. There's an interesting use of mythology in the movie, but I'm not entirely certain that it was deliberate. In places the pacing seems a bit slow, but overall I think it's very watchable

think it would be quite hard to include spoilers as few people seem to agree on what happened anyway. Roger Ebert's review seems very different than a version I have just seen, it must have been recut to make more sense at some point.

I saw a this at a London test screening and the only clear memory is the beauty of Ellen Barkin and Marcus Miller and Miles Davis's music.

This may be a spoiler but it is for the good of humanity, I never want to see the pus ugly oaf Alexei Sayle ever again, in any context, never mind sexual.

For the gentlemen who asked about Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet, this is bassist/ composer (and mo fo) Marcus Miller