If you are a follower of the works of director Abel Ferrara, and you saw Go Go Tales your only hint that he also directed the darker “King of New York” and “Bad Lieutenant” would be the controversy that his unconventional film making style garners.
Ray Ruby’s Paradise’s owner (Willem Dafoe), his staff (Bob Hoskins and Frankie Cee), their dancers (Asia Argento and others) VIP guests, first-time clients, and landlord (Sylvia Miles) who, I should add was responsible for me almost losing bladder control, cohabit every nook and cranny of this chaotic cabaret. Multiple cameras, including surveillance act like flies on the wall catching hysterical banter in hallways and backstage.
This brazen, farcical comedy plops you right in the muck of a sleazy downtown Manhattan go-go bar in need of life support. A film so different from Ferrara’s usual depiction of seedy inner-city lifestyles as afflictive, lurid or serious prompted those with pre-conceived notions to walkout at the Vancouver Film Festival screening.
Perhaps the critics who inaccurately touted “Go Go Tales” as a sexy strip-club romp in the vein of “Exotica” are to blame? Go Go Tales is a good lesson that setting (a paradise cabaret) and characters (exotic dancers) don’t necessarily equate the presumed story to match. That point is precisely why I liked this film so much.
All the characters in this film were as hard to turn your eyes from as a car crash. It wasn’t just the naked gyrating female pelvises and asses in jumbo-tron close-up either.
Ferrara was going for a “Kubrick” style, where most of the sets are lit using only the practicals (or lamps that are already a part of the environment) as light sources. This choice lended itself to the natural, raw look of the picture. Special attention wasn’t paid to shoot the dancers in a “sexy” way. Don’t get me wrong the women in this movie are beautiful, many of them models. But model beauty isn’t the same as exotic dancer beauty. I overheard a dissapointed couple in the seats behind me remarking on the lack of big boobs and dancing talent in this movie. So, if you’re looking for that kind of action, you might want to rent Showgirls instead. Shot choices weren’t motivated to have us see the dancers as sexual goddesses whose one goal is to be visually arousing and pleasure guests of the club. The performers were in it for the money, and a lot of them were obvious about it. In one part a client is taken upstairs for a private dance where the dancer repeats the lines “sign the check” and her customer seems oblivious to her greed, he’s smiling and being titillated regardless. “Okay baby I’ll sign it, you like it like that?” This is one of the many scenes whose humor lies in our ability to laugh at what makes both man and women fallible.
I really liked Go Go Tales, I found myself laughing so hard from one scene that I was embarrassingly still laughing about it into the serious one that followed. I’m a stickler for comedies too, anyone who read my Balls of Fury review knows this too well. On that note, Abel Ferrara has been a well-known Christopher Walken collaborator. As my friend Quint (who is the biggest Walken fan known to man) once said:
“Any movie without Christopher Walken is missing Christopher Walken.”
No Walken aside, I’d like to see Ferrara thumb his nose at some of his harshest critics and carry on in his controversial shoot-from the hip New York style filmmaking.
My only criticism of this movie is that a little more love and care could have been put into the postproduction. Maybe it’s just because my day-job is video editing, but it seemed a little rushed from the cutting room.
There was a scene in the movie nearing the last act, where it repeats itself exactly. One of Ray’s underlings is in a dispute with a protesting dancer (in a close-up shot) he says “We never pay the dancers during a show” then it cuts away to a different camera in real time to a different room and time passes. Then the scene cuts back to the dispute and there he is again, saying the same line in the exact same way, the only difference is it’s a master shot. It didn’t seem like this moment was repeated intentionally. The edit felt like a mistake. It’s hard to explain what was unusual about it on paper because that kind of thing gets done a lot in film, even purposefully. But jarring cuts, especially a few of them in a row can take me right out of a film. Many of the scenes in Go Go Tales felt like rough-cuts. I know from reading interviews with the filmmakers that this (in part) had to do with their freewheeling process, newbies on continuity and lack of coverage. In the end though, the over-all coherence of the story might have suffered because of it.
At the New York press screening for the film, Ferrara said something to the effect of wanting to turn this movie into a TV series like “The Sopranos”. I’d agree! This premise would definitely make a great series in the vein of six feet under. I’m rooting for that to happen for sure.
-Midol Girl
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