The Blackout

Abel Ferrara's "Blackout" stars Matthew Modine as Matty, a self-loathing addict and Hollywood actor. Essentially a feature length short story, the film watches as Matty attempts to both crawl his way out of addiction and atone for an event which happened during a memory blackout. To say any more would be to spoil Ferrara's plot.

Suffice to say that Ferrara's aesthetic perfectly echoes Matty's hallucinatory mindset. Hazy and trance-like, and set in the slime-world of a neon-lit Miami, the film moves like a lava lamp. When he's not salivating over drugs and booze, Matty's knee deep in strippers, beautiful women and pornography. This, of course, all echoes Ferrara's own life; he was himself once an addict and pornographer.

"Blackout's" plot eventually becomes something akin to Hitchcock's "Vertigo". Here Matty is revealed to be a deeply disturbed man who chases doubles and who hungers irrationally for ghostly women. Unsurprisingly, Ferrara's portrayal of an addict/alcoholic is sympathetic and crackles with authenticity; Ferrara knows his material well. Strange for a film which features copious female nudity, the film sympathises with its women. Ferrara's nudity may be gratuitous, but is rarely erotic. The film co-stars a mostly inept Dennis Hopper and a occasionally raw and powerful Mathew Modine.

7.9/10 – Worth one viewing.

It takes a while to get into the movie's mood - Modine's druggy trawl through a razor-sharp Miami is not very well differentiated despite Ferrara's excellent handling, teetering at the edge of surrender to the prevailing decadence but always retaining a distinct alienation and fascinated disgust. Later on the style becomes more tightly formal and controlled, befitting Modine's cleared up state, and Ferrara's portrayal of his obsession and disquietude is very effective in a more conventionally expositional way. Towards the end the mechanics of the ultimate revelation really take over, but Hopper's final long profane shouting fit at Modine after he learns the truth is too hard-hitting to be set aside, and the high-risk final image is oddly touching - the movie is a plausible account of a true lost soul grappling for stability in a world of temptation and internal darkness, with neat (albeit stunt) casting.

We're all stuck with narrow selves through the day, doing our best to mind our part in the noisy, incoherent narrative of life, organizing a myriad worries with one eye at the clock. At nights however, some nights, we dream, have passionate sex or watch truly mind-bending movies, drawing fresh water from the well of deep, mysterious non-self which is the great dancefloor where lovers meet their dragon.

So here's a film about a man haunted by a half-remembered night from his past, who wakes up inside a dream to find himself. The film begins and ends with shots of the protagonist in his own primordial sea, the sea of clarity and dissolved self. He is a famous actor, to stress the roles and guises of that weekday showbiz self we carry with us everywhere. A lot of time is spent around film sets and cameras.

The film is split in two very clear halves, a usual trope of films about memory since Vertigo; the long, blurry Miami night of sexual obsession and going back 18 months later. Overt drugging and boozing insert the dazedness of mind. The meta-aspects of the work involving a sex video being made and 'looking back' through cameras are thin and obvious. And Ferrara's attempt at a script-less improvised feel among the actors does not pan out in the least, not solely Modine's fault this.

My guess is that it does not pan out because Ferrara is not a genuinely curious, patient person like Altman who takes pleasure in the tentative brushing of characters, Ferrara is eager to get to the bleeding soul. I don't have to reach out to his other films to confirm this, here's a film about yearnings but only as acknowledged through an overbearing sense of misery and self-pity.

The obvious self-reference. The emotional bluntness. The shouting and partying as some acidic edge. These are all the same, short narrative distance away from the viewer. The film can be described as David Lynch films Le Mepris but all that French, Godardian baggage are as cumbersome now as thirty years prior. So in narrative terms, it is a modest failure.

And yet I recommend this to you on its power to enchant with its visual fabrics. There are all sorts of those:

1) the sex video as in-sight of our guy's hallucinative desires, and grainy handcamera footage as memory, fixing the mind. Dennis Hopper anchors this part as director, channeling both his Blue Velvet and Last Movie chaotic selves. 2) raw, cutting intimacy around the lovely Dalle. 3) warm coziness in New York, with smart usage of Claudia Schiffer as token of bloodless normalcy. 4) the b/w, Nouvelle Vague- inspired interlude at the beach.

You may settle in one or more of those. I settle in the Miami reverie, not the pleasure-seeking itself but those fleeting drive-by shots of nightlife and cloudy views from balconies, the gauzy loss of self and story. Marvelous, marvelous mood. If you mute the drama, it can sink into you.

Abel Ferrara to me is the most interesting and uncompromising American director working in movies today. He has had a career like no other, and one that even his fans would have to admit has been extremely uneven. For every brilliant movie he has made ('Bad Lieutenant', 'King Of New York') he has made some stinkers ('Fear City', 'Dangerous Game'). 'The Blackout' is somewhere between the two, half compelling, half embarrassing failure. Newcomers to Ferrara's work should probably avoid this one until they have sampled a few of his more successful works. One of my big problems with this movie is the casting of Matthew Modine. Modine is a pretty good actor but doesn't have the acting chops (of say, Harvey Keitel or Christopher Walken, previous Ferrara leading men) to really make his role here totally convincing. Modine plays a young Hollywood star who is out of control on booze, sex and drugs ala the real life escapades of Christian Slater or Robert Downey, Jr. A few of his scenes were excellent, but overall I just didn't believe him. The rest of the cast is a little shaky too. Beatrice Dalle ('Betty Blue') and supermodel Claudia Schiffer are both adequate but not that compelling, and Dennis Hopper, who I am a major fan of, just hams it up in what my friends call a "hey, maaaaaaan!" role. It was good to see Steven Bauer ('Scarface') in this movie, an underrated actor who hasn't received the roles he deserves, but then he is only given a few lines, and then he's gone. I'm also really taken by the beautiful Sarah Lassez who starred in Gregg Araki's weird and wonderful 'Nowhere', released the same year as this. I was hoping she became a major star, but sadly it looks like that isn't going to happen. 'The Blackout' is by no means Ferrara's worst movie but it is also far from his best. As uneven as it is fans will get enough out of it to justify watching it, but he can do so much better than this! A very frustrating movie this one.

What is real stimulating about an Abel Ferrara movie is that, whether you like it or not, it'll never leave you indifferent. In my point of view, "The Blackout" is not among the better ones, I'd even call it a failure, but has some great moments and several points of interest. After all, it comes from Ferrara, one of the most personal looks in cinema today, and what comes from a great director, even if it's not that good, at least it's worth trying.

Be aware: it's difficult to come into "The Blackout" because it's basically confusing (too much I have to say). But even if it's not well handled, this style is coherent with the argument as far as Ferrara wants to bring to images the point of view of an alcoholic during a monumental hangover.

If you are capable of going through the first thirty minutes, you'll be rewarded with an stimulating reflection about addiction and the limits between fiction and reality: the key of the main character's enigmatic hangover seems to be found in the filming of an experimental movie... another excuse to reflect on the dark side of movie making and the status of the director.

Try it. Maybe you'll like it or maybe you'll end leaving it in the middle, but at least, this film will make you react in some way, which is not very usual in cinema today.