jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe with slicked back hair and a lucky leisure suit) runs a New York strip club where girls wearing g-strings and glitter gyrate to Grace Jones, but beneath the sleazy exterior beats the heart of a romantic. Ray Ruby’s got a dream: he wants his club to be a place where every kid gets a chance, where people take care of each other, and everybody has a good time. Between strip acts, he croons syrupy ballads. No wonder the place is called Ray Ruby’s Paradise.

But Paradise is in a spot of trouble. Ray has to contend with “shifting demographics,” the rent is in arrears, the dancers haven’t been paid, the obnoxious landlady (Sylvia Miles) wants to let Bed Bath & Beyond take over. During one hectic night, girls confess they’re pregnant, the tanning machine in the basement goes up in flames, and the gourmet cook feels under-appreciated. Owner Johnie Ruby (Matthew Modine), a “big shot hair dresser,” threatens to pull the plug but takes a minute for a quick back room dalliance with Monroe (Asia Argento), who specializes in on-stage acts with her Rottweiler. On top of it all, Ray has a gambling problem. It looks like he may have won the lottery, but he lost the damn ticket. No wonder he’s oozing desperation, no matter how radiant his sweaty smile.

With Go Go Tales, Abel Ferrara has made his first “intentional comedy,” telling stories of a bygone New York he recalled with relish at the NYFF post-screening press conference. Go Go Tales is a joyful mess. Not every gag works, not every character convinces, and most shots of the near-naked dancers are entirely gratuitous, but the film’s sensory overload and exploitative mood seem entirely appropriate for the subject matter, and Ferrara’s evident love for the world shines through even the most haphazardly improvised scenes. Like Ray Ruby’s Paradise, Go Go Tales is far from perfect, but it’s a hell of a sleazy good time anyway.

Go Go Tales. Abel Ferrara, 2007. ***

• Official Site

Here’s my video in three parts of the press conference with Abel Ferrara, Willem Dafoe, Sylvia Miles, Shanyn Leigh, and Frankie Cee. Richard Peña leads the discussion.

Yet another Tribeca dud, Taxidermia is one of the most unpleasant movies I’ve ever sat through. György Pálfi (Hukkle) directed this Hungarian Grand Guignol grotesquery that riffs on exactly three ideas: pig fucking, speed eating, and self-taxidermy. Based on short stories by Lajos Parti Nagy, the movie presents the fable-like history of a freakish family. In the first section, a harelipped country pervert who can shoot fire from his dick is looking for ever-new kicks in well-lubricated glory holes and Hans Christian Andersen tales that turn into their porno versions. Imaginative camera work and extreme close-ups create an intense physicality, but they don’t lead to a place you want to follow: by the end of the segment, butchery, adultery, and shocking acts of bestiality and necrophilia sent waves of nervous giggles through the audience. The walk-outs started.

The remainder of the movie tells the stories of the pig-fucking pervert’s offspring. His son, born with a curly tail (ha ha!), becomes one of the Eastern Bloc’s most successful “sport eaters,” an obese guy in a wrestling leotard wolfing down chunky soups and Russian horse sausage from troughs. Between rounds, the competitors power-barf and chat about the groupies in the audience. Like an SNL sketch that stretches its conceit well past the breaking point, Taxidermia milks the “sport eating” joke for more than its worth: there’s the cross-swallow, the hollowed out red star filled with caviar, the threat of lock jaw. It’s as if Pálfi had decided to take the “mint leaf” sequence from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life and turn it into a feature film. There seems to be some satirical intent, but it’s not pointed enough to sting.

The third section is the most repulsive: close-ups of taxidermy in progress were never on my must-see list, and the skinning, gutting, and sawing is made worse by the fact that the pervert’s ghoulish grandson is operating on himself. And I haven’t even told you about the gutted fetus, to be filed under “sights that cannot be unseen.” Not every movie has to be a pleasant experience, but Taxidermia struck me as a pointless gross-out, inventive but without sufficient character or story to support its grotesque excesses.

Taxidermia. György Pálfi, 2006. *

• Filmbrain finds Taxidermia “a fascinating treatise on excess, desire, and the politics of the body.”
• The trailer: