LIQUID SKY (1982)
Dir: Slava Tsukerman
80′s GLAM BLONDIE GOES BOATING
Here's another one for my list of great 80s cult movies, one I will remember as fondly as Repo Man, Blue Velvet and Videodrome. The vision is maybe less accomplished but as vibrant as those films, basically what we get at first glance is something between Daisies (the Czech film) and a Yugoslav film I recently discovered called W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism, with many of the same preoccupations— youth, feminism, freedom of expression, attitudes to sex, contrasted with repressive mores in men and sex. The obvious metaphor used here is aliens (as in a flying saucer lands in New york) for the emerging glam punk scene with its androgynous Bowie sex-image and post-Factory and Warhol scene with its drugs and ersatz madness as style. AIDS had officially entered the lexicon the year before, this is reflected in the film as the men evaporating when they achieve an orgasm with our 'alien' heroine. The whole worldview behind this is what you can expect from the 80s. Rejection, solipsism, a general detachment from anything that does not please a sense of escape and fulfillment now, a numbed attitude I normally find vacant. Usually mistaken as Zen, it seems to attach itself to American youth every decade or so since the mods. And yet the dignified assertion of individuality in the face of small-mindedness and abuse shows a still sparkling soul—the girl casually invites to her place a stranger from the club because he promised cocaine, and seems surprised and mildly disgusted that he lied and basically expected sex. Three women are finding out the men in their lives are not worth it, the junkie boyfriend is more interested in his own pleasures, the German in his science of 'observing'. The young model, who exists with more freedom outside the norm, unconsciously removes them from the story. In the end, this synthetic avatar of freedom and unconventionality is consumed and magically disappears in the night as the two women watch. In its nested layering of created situations where a woman explores by allowing fragmented selves to be explored, this is situated close to two of my favorite movies of all time, another Eastern European film called Loves of A Blonde, and Celine and Julie. It's an 80s take on dreamy flight. It's all here so lovely and heartfelt about the overall world, with its heady cocktail of now innocent strangeness and still evocative flicker in the eye. The New York penthouse at night, with its open balcony to gleaming skyscrapers is one of the most vital spaces in any film I know. The cool, composed rejection of fixed roles and images, tuning out minus the constructed cosmology of world-renewal of a decade earlier. The painted faces of models casually desperate to be captured against the gleaming skyscraper-void, stating nothing beyond the flickering moment of things coming to be. The parting shot with our heroine lost in her dervish spin in the dark, a dreamy incarnation that couldn't last.
4/5
