Stars: Harvey Keitel, Madonna, James Russo, Victor Argo, Nancy Ferrara

Director: Abel Ferrara

Summary: A film director becomes obsessed with his new movie and soon his personal life begins to suffer.

Director Abel Ferrara followed up the triumph of BAD LIEUTENANT with this quasi-autobiographical film. Harvey Keitel stars as Eddie Israel, a director whose current project, MOTHER OF MIRRORS, seems to parallel his own life (which in turn parallels Ferrara's). The film-within-a-film stars Sarah Jennings (Madonna) and Francis Burns (James Russo) as a married couple whose shared life of cocaine, booze, and group sex has come to an end now that she has renounced her past in favor of God. Drinking heavily and snorting coke to get into his role, Francis finds the violent behavior of his character taking over his reality, as he starts abusing Sarah off the set as well as on. Eddie meanwhile starts his own affair with Sarah, leading to a confrontation with his wife (played by Nancy Ferrara, Abel's real-life spouse) and his own moral dissolution. Shot on a variety of film stocks, this search for spiritual redemption--drenched in violence, drugs, and sex--makes for a heavy viewing experience. Regardless of opinion about the film itself, there is no denying the sheer bravery of this unflinching mirror of Ferrara's own life and art.

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Abel Ferrara's taste for the sensational is on display in the flawed but interesting Dangerous Games, even though its subject matter is a long way from the genre material in which he has mostly specialised. The film is a psychological drama in which the Method manipulations of director Eddie (Harvey Keitel) prey on the weaknesses of coke-head actor Burns (James Russo) and insecure soap star Sarah (Madonna) to a point where reality breaks down for all three of them--and, in the film's last moments, the audience too; we are left traumatically hanging by a profound ambiguity in what we have just seen. Ferrara moves backwards and forwards between naturalistic and staged shots: we see scenes in hand-held verité and as rushes on a video. The over-wrought drama of consumerism, decadence and possible redemption that is being shot in the film is clearly intended to be directly relevant to their lives and is only marginally more melodramatic; at one point, Eddie's wife arrives unexpectedly at his hotel room moments after Sarah has left his bed. Keitel gives his usual authoritative performance as a weak man breaking under the weight of his pretensions; as Sarah, Madonna gives one of her less bad performances, attractively underplaying amid a storm of hamminess. On the DVD: the DVD only gives us subtitles and the trailer as extras. --Roz Kaveney

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Year:	1993
Release Date:	April 30, 2001
Runtime:	104 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	078 182 2
Keywords:	Action, Dangerous, Game, General, Adventure
Genre:	Action/Adventure