Subject: REVIEW: POISON

From: [email-masked] (Frank MALONEY)
Date: 10 Jul 91 14:12:35 GMT

[Followups directed to rec.arts.movies.  This is cross-posted to
rec.arts.sf-reviews because of the three pieces making up POISON,
one is fantasy and one is science fiction/horror. -Moderator]

				    POISON
		       A film review by Frank Maloney
			Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney

     POISON is a film written and directed by Todd Haynes.  The cast
includes Larry Maxwell, Susan Norman, Scott Renderer, and James Lyon.

     POISON is simply a brilliant film.  I recommend it highly.  Not
only is it worth full-ticket price, it is worth a drive to another city,
since it is not being distributed very widely.  Even in film-loving
Seattle, it was booked into one of the theaters in the University
District, the most movie-intense neighborhood in Seattle, for a mere
12-day run.  That run concludes today as I write and whether it will be
continued at another venue is an open question.

     POISON has gotten some box-office power by being the latest target
of the Rev.  Donald Wildmon's American Family Association and its war on
queers.  And some reviewers have found it unsettling.  I call it a
challenging film, that has learned a new way to be a movie.  Its
structure, its narrative style, are challenging.  The contents are
fascinating, but hardly worthy of controversy.

     The source for its stories and its mood of angry isolation come
from the writings of Jean Genet.  Genet is quoted on screen from time to
time and his voice, as it were, can be heard especially in the narrative
of "Homo," one of the three interlocking stories that make up POISON.
Otherwise, the film presents more the spirit of Genet than it does
filmed versions of his novels.  Each of the three stories has a distinct
look and feel to it and the film can cut from one to the next without
difficulty or confusion.  In the end, it doesn't matter anyway, since
all three merge and conclude as a single unified piece.  This is a film
film-students need to study in depth.

     The first story we encounter is "Hero," a mock documentary about a
seven-year-old boy who, we are told in a dead pan voiceover, shot his
father to death and literally flew off the bedroom balcony.  The boy is
reconstructed with interviews with his teacher, neighbors, school mates,
and mother.

     The second story is "Horror," an absolutely perfect send-up of a
Roger-Corman, mad-scientist, b&w, cheapie sci-fi, Fifties film.  Haynes
once again has the look down perfectly.  The scientist is assisted by a
desperately bland Susan Norman, who ought to get some kind of award for
her achievement here.  "Horror" may be a parable of AIDS, or it may be
something less specific.  It like the others offers the pleasure of
sharp style and a serious observation about human nature, about
isolation and being different as a threat to the majority.

     The third component is the key to the controversy "Homo," a story
about a habitual criminal (like Genet himself), who is in prison and
falls in love with another prisoner, a man he knew at reform school.
There is some homosexual sex and male nudity in "Homo," but compared to
the rape and mayhem of so-called commercial movies there ought not to be
anything remarkable here for any but the most homophobic and/or
hypocritical.  Actually, the most shocking scene, the one that did
disturb me, was a terrible ritual of humiliation inflicted on a gay boy
by his straight fellow inmates in a flashback to the reformatory.  The
views of isolation, humiliation, love, and that prison we all live in
would be devastating if the story were not told in such an impassive,
detached manner.

     Detachment is the major fault of POISON overall.  And its saving
quality.  I think the movie would be too strong for me without the
distance the film puts between us and the stories.  The ironic use of
rather campy styles in two of the stories and the cutting back and forth
between the three release our tension and make POISON survivable.

     Do see if you can.  It is a remarkable film and is worthy of its
audience.

-- 
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney