You Can Dress Her Up...

BRIAN DePALMA'S Dressed to Kill is a steamy, lurid thriller involving a sexually-dissatisfied Manhattan housewife. her brainy teenage son, her psychiatrist, an expensive call girl, and a transvestite killer wearing dark sunglasses and a dirty blond wig, wielding a straightrazor. The story proper is too silly to waste space explaining. You get a sharp sense of the confusion at the film's center when you realize that DePalma plundered the plot, the essential development of jolts, twists and red herrings, from Hitchcock's Psycho. There are two shower sequences, and a murder in an elevator--which is pretty much like a shower--and a number of clever, knowing spoofs, but most of the Hitchcock parallels, if you care to match them up, are distractingly imprecise, like blotchy coloring in a comic strip, and taken together they hardly compose an adequate story. The picture runs on the suspense inherent in the situation--Who is the killer? When will he strike next?--but it doesn't really go anywhere, and the whole production seems merely derivative and muddled, flashy strictly in spots.

This comes as no great surprise. While Hitchcock's talent lay in planting even the most implausible action within plots that were enclosed in, and aerated by, chilly factual details, DePalma has always submerged his stories under a torrent of extravagant stylistic effects, ditching Hitchcock's logic, his psychological insight, his mooring in the specific tension and atmosphere of a given situation or place. He shares Hitchcock's cynicism about human relations, but he has none of the sly, mordant perception that makes this cynicism persuasive and disquieting. In Dressed to Kill he dispenses with Psycho's emotional complications and seizes on Hitchcock's technique--subjective camerawork, sudden high-angle shots, the portentous close-up--so that the horror, and the style by which it's conveyed, become the core of the film.

It's only during the high-voltage stuff, the really extreme violence, that DePalma becomes most securely and resourcefully himself. His special skill lies in an ability not merely to prepare for and describe violence, but to enter into it, conveying a character's awed, frozen awareness of disaster by prolonging and intensifying an action trhough slow-motion shots, slash-cutting, emphasis of details as in a dream. In this he approximates--the analogy only sounds far-fetched--the experiments of the best Soviet filmmakers of the '20s: breaking action and events into flurries of separate shots to deliver something of the full immediacy and impact of felt experience. Among contemporary directors, only Nicolas Roeg (Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth) has as sure and dramatic sense of how effective this fragmentation technique works on an audience.

THE TROUBLE is that DePalma, unlike Roeg, is uninterested in extending his technical inventions into the body of a film using them to invigorate and give meaning to a story's more casual, empty, expository sections. A good deal of the direction in Dressed to Kill appears awkward or perfunctory. Shot for shot, through patches of inaction and weaker stretches of suspense, the movie advances with a clumsy, prosaic quality--not unlike the flat-footed style of Kubrick's The Shining, which DePalma, in a recent interview, says he detests.

De Palma's ineptitude as a writer doesn't help much. He has no sense for dialogue, and cripples the film's pace with a number of curiously inert scenes featuring stiff, unbelievable talk. Then there is a long wordless sequence, a ludicrous, halting flirtation and pick-up in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, drawn out to run 15 minutes in which DePalma (like Kubrick) deploys a steadicam camera, swimming and veering through the chambered rooms, using a subjective panning shot to cover an arc of space that the character, in fact, could take in at a glance. (The device amounts to a kind of cheating, a withholding of information to milk suspense.) And when it occurs to Angie Dickenson that she has forgotten, say, her wedding ring, DePalma shows a split screen image of the ring on one side of the frame, her exasperated face on the other. (He uses this device three times early in the picture, then drops it.)

It's disturbing to see such bluffing and two-plus-two obviousness in the work of a man generally regarded as a master of style. All the same, the film is divertingly spiked with scenes in which DePalma admits and mocks the fatuousness of what he's presenting. The biggest tip-off is the incongruously languid, heavily orchestrated, ham-strung music, which seems brought on by mistake from another movie. At the outset of the museum scene, for instance, Angie Dickenson sits alone on a bench, looking at a large billboard-flat painting by Alex Katz--a portrait of a woman, a hand raised to her eyes, staring off into the distance. Dickenson shares with the woman in the painting an air of smart, spoiled boredom, a look of vacuity. DePalma dramatically cuts between shots of the painting and low-angle close-ups of Dickenson. Her mouth tremors; her eyes, embedded in square sockets of blue eye-shadow, widen as if receiving a communication of great profundity. The music swoons, surgest she scratches a few words in her little black book. More music. Cut back to the painting. Back to Angie. What is she writing? DePalma shows us: "Pick up Turkey!"

This isn't really funny in itself; the episode works because it's so out of whack with the dramatics of the plot, so smirkingly contemptuous of Dickenson's character, so unnecessary and marginal to the movie's main action and yet inflated to appear like a crucial scene. Most of the humor throughout the picture is similarly point-less, derisive and unaligned with the story's primary course of action. It's used as a kind of filler to bridge scenes of suspense or violence--which are all DePalma really cares about--and it is significant that, of the four or five really suspenseful, violent scenes, three are built into dreams, occurring only in a character's mind but presented in such a way--with a tight, dramatic progression of details--that you can't know they're dreams until each sequence is played out. Which only goes to show how useless the story is, how DePalma has to step outside his plot, outside the plausible development of events, to deliver the goods.

Some of these complaints, and a few others--bridling at the film's bluntly exploitational treatment of women, the disregard for character development, the extreme vicious streak--can be deflected by the claim that DePalma's theme, after all, is sexual fantasy. The whole film, it can be said, is intended as a pleasantly nasty sexual fantasy, with all its extravagance and questionable taste registering as expressions of DePalma's basic idea that sex is a dark dirty joke. This is true so far as it goes, and there's a spark of additional interest in light of the film's attention to masturbation--as part of the characters' lives, and as a projected activity of the voyeuristic audience, the director and his unrestrainable camera. But the movie is hardly so sharply focused and all of a piece for this to be given much thought. The actors simply frown and spoof their way through the thing, treading water in the thickest nonsense until DePalma decides to drown the show in a wave of opulent violence.

THE IMPRESSION may be an optical illusion, but the last few years seem to be shaping into an era of unprecedented mediocrity in American movies. Few people currently making or writing about films show themselves capable of understanding what the creative intelligence in movies involves and requires. Several critics have praised Dressed to Kill for its wickedness, its unabashed vulgarity, its visceral kick. Some have hailed it as the first great film of the new decade. Well, it's nice to have someone around to tell us these things.