Keenest, Most Searing Moment in Great Lynch Movie on Hollywood

Rating: Null/10 (23 April 2004)

This movie lets personas and bodies really be the reality; it seems to have some Robbe-Grillet play to it (although there are "fewer" variations here than one finds there--but certainly more depth of feeling as well.) The most interesting is, of course, the metamorphosis--almost worthy of Kafka's--of Naomi Watts's Betty into Diane. We see her giving back a grimy-looking pile of household items to a neighbour; they have such a worthless aura to them they scarcely seem worth the energy to even walk next door and retrieve. She is drinking heavily now and the apartment radiates only irreversible decline, hopelessness and shame: She has gone well past merely "circling the drain," as Bruce Wagner might put it.

On her funky slum-land sofa, she masturbates, remembering her girlfriend (played by Laura Elena Harring); and we get a devastating portrait of loneliness that has become the deepest grief.
There is a phenomenally cold shot of the Hollywood sign toward the beginning.
There is Ann Miller as the landlady and her name is "Catherine 'Coco' Lenoix," and she doesn't seem all that French.
The apartments all seem straight out of Nathaniel West.

You're on your own in L.A.