The Blackout
Abel Ferrara, USA/France, 1997, 99 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)
It's been a tough year for Ferrara fans. His knack of churning the horrors out on an almost annual basis - aided by the quirks of distribution - have gifted us three of his nasty little psycho-dramas in just 10 months. It's enough to have even the most therapy-phobic reaching for The 12 Steps.
Just like Matty (Matthew Modine), a rich kid movie star who signs the pledge after a lost weekend that looks like turning into a career. He was content to drift on in his coke and booze addled way until that time in Miami when he argued with girlfriend Annie (Beatrice Dalle, competent as ever) about her abortion. And the fact that he blacked out soon after and can't remember what happened to her. Eighteen months on, he's clean and living happily in New York with new love Susan (Claudia Schiffer, adequate), but plagued by dark dreams of Florida that hint at something terrible. That's what draws him back down south, using the bottle as his passport into the past and the awful revelations that lie in wait for him there.
If some of this rings familiar, that might be because The Blackout plays not unlike Ferrara's earlier Dangerous Game (aka Snake Eyes), wherein Harvey Keitel played a ferocious Ferrara-like director to Madonna's long-suffering star. Here, though, Ferrara flips roles, making Modine's Matty (a driven performance, by far the best in the picture) the star, giving his own part over to king of the B-picture bad boys, Dennis Hopper. Hopper's is a supporting role, as a 'video artist' (read, pretentious soft porn) who casts Annie in his picture and has a curiously ambiguous relationship with Matty. He also looks as though he wasn't so much directed as pointed in the general direction of the action and ignited; he's at his most off-the-wall since Blue Velvet, though this pent-up, foul-mouthed act is beginning to look a little too mannered.
Ferrara has always liked to wallow in shit, and like Dangerous Game, The Blackout (easily the better picture) delights in rubbing our collective noses in it. It's coolly scored by Joe Delia, and superbly shot by Ken Kelsch (for once making Ferrara's usual New York beat look positively inviting set against Miami's neon-washed open sewer). But it's too ill-focused to really score big, as though being without regular collaborator Nick St John and his surfeit of Catholic guilt, self-abuse and gratuitous swearing will be enough to turn our heads. Though one masterpiece (The Addiction), a distinctly classy piece of work (The Funeral), and this intriguing failure all in just ten months is the kind of track record a no-mark like Speilberg would kill for. It's a must-see, even if not for all the right reasons.