To continue with Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, which we left last time with Angie Dickinson in the Scandinavian-modern office of her matinee-idolish psychiatrist, Michael Caine. The heartwarming headshrinker is administering to his long-time patient a simplistic brand of therapy that suggests that neither of them has been involved with this sort of thing before. Such lack of credibility—and psychiatric explanations escalate into ludicrous absurdity as the film proceeds—matters only because De Palma is being hailed as a serious artist. If he were that, even his light entertainments or Gothic thrillers would have some bearing on at least a stylized reality, which is what distinguishes the fluff of an artist from the machinations of a manipulator.
Angie goes off to what is supposed to be the Metropolitan Museum but is actually its Philadelphia cousin, where she sits before a huge, junky portrait by Alex Katz and jots down shopping reminders into her agenda. The contrast between the museum setting and the scribbled trivia would be enough for a director with taste, but De Palma must drag in the photorealist portrait of a gorilla (pintor—to me—ignotus) from the opposite wall for what seems to be a further ironic comment. But what does it mean? (I wonder, incidentally, whether this atrocity actually hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) The fact that Angie’s eager head (she appears to be using the museum as a pick-up place) is often shot against the crotch of a Philip Pearlstein nude is an unmistakable comment, though not one a director with finesse would find it necessary to make.
Comments