Painted Angels

This film shows the real thing, how it probably was working at a small-town bordello during late 19th century. Nothing fancy at all. This is what it really was like. I liked the unusual structure of the film, the status quo-feeling that is so much more real compared to the basic -beginning-build up-the hero's back on top- structure. This is a great film! Unfortunately, it's an acquired taste.

Philip French Sunday 20 June 1999 guardian.co.uk

Painted Angels (1998, 15, Artificial Eye, Rental/Retail) In Ride the High Country (1962), Sam Peckinpah put the whores into the horse opera, making the once taboo subject of frontier prostitution a proper theme for Westerns. Jon Sanders' unsentimental, non-prurient Painted Angela, one of the most realistic accounts of sex out West, concerns the girls in a brothel run by ruthless Irish madam Brenda Fricker on the fringe of a bleak prairie town in the 1880s. A socially detailed, achingly moving story of brutality and occasional tenderness is unfolded with considerable subtlety. The cast, headed by Kelly McGillis, is flawless.

The film is made in the manner of a dark brooding Scandinavian melodrama and is more of a slice of the darker side of prostitution. I saw it on video by Sterling and they should be shot for the box promotion which indicated more of a sensual sexual randy tale: "Expert in the pleasures of the flesh, these women...put the wild in the west." Obviously the person writing this did not bother to watch the film. On the video cover three saloon dressed typed women were added (none of whom were in the movie) further adding to the false advertising of the film. Yes it is slow and even boring and hardly uplifting, but it is a tale of women trapped in a degrading 'lifestyle.' The nudity in this film is about as titilating as the nudity in Jennifer Connelly's "Requiem for a Dream".

The movie is slow, but it's nicely shot. And the slowness is like a metaphor, for their lives. Their lives were slow. What did people do in the prairies in the middle of winter in 1890? Nothing So,the film mimics their lives and forces us to slow down to their pace. Kelly McGillis is a sweetheart, she always has been and should have more leading roles than she does. She is my dream lady.

I just watched this film. It was unrelenting, a story of the rough circumstances prostitutes endured in the West a little more than a century ago. Its a woman's story, almost totally without a male point of view. The men are represented as beings who mostly just mumble and play cards. Their voices are heard often muttering on the soundtrack. We can't make out what they're actually saying. Representing the guys as stick figures helps emphasize in what reduced and lonely circumstances the prostitutes inhabit their dance hall and saloon world. There are no women who are not prostitutes in this early western town. Just as the men have little regard for the women, the women think little of the men. I think this may be a fairly truthful accounting of the West before it was civilized. The film has got me thinking about how desperate male-female relationships may have been in America not all that long ago.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----