"Donald Cammell's Wild Side"
Donald Cammell's Wild Side is the posthumous
"director's cut" of Cammell's fourth and last work, and it is one of the
most extraordinary, bizarre and uproarious films that you can see this
year - a dreamlike sortie into eroticism and crime and neurosis which
results in a black comedy pulp noir.
This is especially true in the case of Christopher
Walken as Bruno, the sinister money launderer, who goes richly over the
top as never before. He is just ionospherically over the top. He is, as
someone says to him in one scene, "out there", and he surely is: a madly
florid and gamey performance that is the strongest of strong meat.
Brutal rape, high-class prostitution, sexual fantasy, and zillion-dollar financial fraud all jostle for attention in a film which repeatedly and wilfully brings itself to the brink of implausibility and chaos, yet steps back to become an original and exhilarating thriller, capriciously intelligent, with experimentalism and verve. This cut is the scholarly reconstruction by Cammell's editor Frank Mazzola and Cammell's widow China Kong, who was, with him, co-author of the screenplay. Cammell's original film, shot in 1994, was wrested from his control by producers Nu-Image and heavily cut and re-edited for the cable TV market, so that it resembled nothing so much as a steamy episode of Miami Vice. Only now, some years after Donald Cammell's suicide in 1996, have Mazzola and Kong been able to re-build the nearest approximation possible of the original work, using the late director's notes. (When this film was premiered at last year's Edinburgh Festival, it was accompanied by a remarkable on-stage talk from Frank Mazzola and China Kong, who were able to show extracts from the butchered, and utterly different "TV version": furnishing us with an unmissable masterclass in the realities of film editing and a radical essay in the textual aspects of cinema. I hope that Mr Mazzola and Ms Kong can be persuaded to repeat this lecture all over the country.) The plot that Cammell assembles could hardly be more toweringly absurd. Anne Heche plays Alex, a beautiful young woman who works in a shady and disreputable investment bank. Threatened with the sack for refusing to put out for a mega-wealthy client, she needs new income to service the mortgage on her fabulous beachfront house - so she becomes a high-class call girl! But Cammell muffles the ironies and illogicalities of this by reshuffling the sequence of events: and we are plunged straight away into her encounter with a client: über-criminal Christopher Walken, with his dyed black hair and lizardly features looking even more vampiric than he did in The Addiction. He is paying Heche a grand and a half to do weird stuff to him with sex toys in his hotel suite.
His driver and bodyguard Tony (Steven Hauer)
drives her back to her house afterwards, and in a stomach-turning scene
rapes her - then sneeringly reveals that he is an undercover cop who has
Walken under surveillance and blackmails Alex into helping him. It is a
queasy sink of double-cross and betrayal which is worsened and yet
redeemed when Heche finds herself falling into an intensely passionate
affair with Walken's beautiful Chinese wife, Virginia (Joan Chen).
So this is a mise-en-scène of almost operatic complexity and stridency, and in the service of this, Cammell elicits the most outrageously camp performance from Walken as the villain. He is hyperactive, weirdly over-articulate, neurotically witty, flutteringly on the verge of a breakdown or anxiety attack, yammering out dialogue with echoes of Mamet or Orton. The scene in which he is about to sodomise Tony in front of Alex as a punishment for raping her is almost indescribable: it is beyond Incorrect, beyond anything in Pulp Fiction. And the resolution to this scene is exquisite in its chutzpah and farcical bad taste. Amidst this stylised grotesquerie, however, is a startlingly intense and believable love story between Virginia and Alex, humane and tender, which is ignited by a very erotic and convincing love scene.
In its current form, Wild Side might simply still
be too sprawling, too undisciplined and in parts too unfocused to gain a
wide following. But it is still an arresting work from this important and
distinctive director. I can only say that in Wild Side a cult classic has
been born. Peter Bradshaw,The Guardian, 2000.
Über Donald Cammell (deutsch)
How many geniuses do you get to work with in
one life?
Cammell's second and final masterpiece had a tortured
genesis. Wild Side was originally made for the exploitation company
Nu Image in 1995. Allegedly their main incentive in hiring the director was
his ability to attract stars such as Christopher Walkan, Anne Heche and Joan
Chen. Although initially claiming to be committed to an art product that
would upgrade their image, the company soon got cold feet. Reportedly the
producer would visit the set to demand more nudity, becoming so irritating
that, as the director's brother David dryly testifies, “at one point he
[Donald] was going to go and shoot [producer] Eli Cohen, but I managed to
persuade him that it was a negative thing to shoot your producer and then
shoot yourself.” In the cutting room, the film was taken away from Cammell
and recut, taking out the director's experimental editing and emphasising
the sex scenes. Cammell disowned this version which editor Frank Mazzola
described as a 'desecration'.
"Things change so much when you're making a movie the final movie doesn't usually have anything much to do with what you started with." (Christopher Walken on the set of Wild Side) "The scene where Bauer has to 'bend over' to prove his loyalty to Christopher Walken and has his underwear torn off, with a non-chalant Anne Heche in the room amused by the goings-ons, is maybe one of the two or three most hilarious, daring, pulling-out-all-the-stops, semi-improvised virtuoso acting scenes in recent cinematic memories..." Cammell himself described the always odd-looking Walken as "dark... funny as shit". "It could as easily be called 'Christopher Walken on the Wild Side', for in that most volatile of American actors Cammell found a perfect exponent of his dangerous art." In particular the relationship between Bruno and Alex echoes that between Cammell and his wife, a point Cammell himself acknowledged. "China is my proteg, which is what Bruno says about Alex I taught her everything I know everything I know, I pumped into China."
"The story is unbelievably
intense and also hilariously funny ‑ the way that life is," Cammell
observed. "But the characters in the film don't think it's funny because a
lot of it is about disaster."
Bruno
Buckingham : Tony, this is not about sex. This is about power. I need to
do this to disgust MYSELF, to become selfless in the name of... love. "The director's cut (pieced together by the Editor after the director's suicide) is an outstanding piece of cinema. Not a frame wasted. The opening sequence shocks you into an awareness that this movie will be very different from anything you've seen before. Chris Walken gives the best performance of his career. This is exciting, original cinema that riveted my attention in every moment of its two hour authorized version...The tenacity and integrity of the Editor and scriptwriter that saw it through to completion is a monument to the industry." Chris Docker
”You know what you get for
rape? Ten years! Ten years, pal! In a cell! With a gorilla!
With a psycho gorilla! Get
on your knees!” ”You know what a Trojan was? A Trojan was a warrior, a man of honor. Never would a Trojan betray an enemy, let alone a friend…”
”That’s why I like her.
She’s not only beautiful; she’s smart. That’s why she’s mine; you
understand? She’s mine.”
Aus der Presse (...) The story of how Wild Side was "cannibalised" by the company that backed it sounds like yet another cautionary tale about the big, bad Hollywood financiers squeezing the life out of the European auteur. At first glance it seems bizarre that Cammell would even countenance working with Nu Image, a company that has always specialised in low‑grade exploitation pics. "Donald had a healthy disrespect for anybody from the financial side of the industry," argues McAlpine (who along with Channel 4 is Paying for the re‑edit of Wild Side). "Whether he took the money from a piranha or a hammerhead shark, it was the same thing to him. What he didn't anticipate was that Nu Image was then going to want the project substantially dumbed down. They were excited by the fact that there was a lot of lesbian sex. They were probably thinking, great, this is going to be a great video rental title ‑ we've just got to get rid of all the extraneous stuff, Le., the intelligence." Nu Image chairman Avi Lerner offers a rather different explanation for his tampering. Sounding a little like Jack Warner, he says he simply didn't understand the film as edited by Cammell. "What Donald tried to do was more artistic things that didn't make any structure or commercial sense." Lerner denies the Nu Image version played up the lesbianism to capitalise on co‑star Anne Heche's coming out'. "The story of Anne Heche happened five or six months ‑unfortunately ‑ after we released the movie. lf it had come before, this movie would have been much more commercially successful. And by the way, the difference between what Donald cut and our cut was not major. It was a structure difference, that's all.' Structure, Mazzola insists, is everything. He runs the opening shots of Wild Side to prove the point. There are images of faces, of water, of an aeroplane flying, of a woman (Heche) in a red roorn, and a flash cut of Christopher Walken mumbling into a telephone. The editing is elliptical, baffling ‑ what you'd expect in a Cammell film. It is also what got Mazzola fired four years ago.
“Nu image completely freaked out," he remembers. "They immediately sent an inter‑office memo saying no flash forwards, no flashbacks" Mazzola then runs the opening of the Nu Image version. "What is this linear piece of junk?" he asks contemptuously as synthesiser music plays over lumpen credits while Heche yanks the hair of a man making a crude pass at her. "This is a Donald Cammell film ‑ the guys just get it." There's something both comic and fascinating about the way the film has been changed by Nu Image. Any subtlety or nuance has been snuffled out. Within three minutes Alex (Heche), a banker, has decided to become a call girl so she can hang on to her beach house. Cammell often talked about his love for such playwrights as Shaw, Wilde and Sheridan, but the dialogue here doesrit exactly zing. "My pimp boss is going to call in my mortgage if I don't fuck our clients. But you know, that's OK. lf I'm going to hook, I'm going to hook, but I do it for myself, not the bank," Alex says defiantly, without deigning to explain why the fact that she has had a row at work means she has to tum to prostitution. Whatever else, the Nu Image version moves quickly. The producers' aim, Mazzola insists, was simply to get the girls together as fast as they could. Cammell, who co‑wrote the screenplay with his wife China Kong, claimed the story was based "on a real thing which happened to a young banker who happened to be a friend of a friend in NewYork. She was very attractive and she decided to do tricks as a call girl because her credit had to be protected." Perhaps her plight was so very different from that of the film‑maker forced into bed with the B‑moviecompany. On one level Wild Side is a straightforward genre piece in whatever version it's shown. Its story about banker‑tumed‑call‑girl Alex who falls in love with Virginia Chow (Joan Chen), the wife of one of her clients (Christopher Walken), who in turn falls in love with her ‑ could be borrowed straight from a Gregory Hippolyte erotic thriller. But you could just as well call Performance a simple tale about a gangster hiding in a rock star's flat as describe Cammell's last film as a conventional thriller. Far more important than the narrative are the extraordinarily fraught relationships between the protagonists. Basically, it's not that different from what I was trying to do when I made Performance," Cammell claimed. "In many ways, this film is echoing stuff there." There is the same emphasis on voyeurism, sexual experimentation ("you know ‑ what froggies call a minage ä trois," Walken's character puts it) and costume. Before meeting clients Alex searches out elegant new outfits and wigs at the Opera House where her friend Lyle (Adam Novack) works. She dresses for Walken as if she's auditioning for a part in La Boheme.
Through a woman's eyes: Buckingham's driver Torty, a macho hunk with a religlous hang‑up, is also an FBI agent. By the end both Buckingham and he look foolishly belligerent to Alex, right, and her lover Virginia is fall of innuendo. They're negotiating, weighing one another up. In the Nu Image cut most of their barbs and taunts are missing ‑ the meeting is played as a straight sex sequence, complete with writhing and exaggerated moans. Much of the clowning between Buckingham and his driver/FBI agent Tony (Steven Bauer) is likewise removed. Bauer, best known for his role opposite Al Pacino in Scarface, brings irony, menace and neurotic energy to his tum as the macho thug with a religious hang‑up, but Nu Image seems intent on cutting his best lines. Paring the dialogue risks straining out the humour. "The story is unbelievably intense and also hilariously funny ‑ the way that life is," Cammell observed. "But the characters in the film don't think it's funny because a lot of it is about disaster." Cammell's characterisation of Wild Side as "Thelma & Louise with sex" seems perfectly apt by the end of the movie. Heche and Chen are the smart ones here; Walken's and Bauer's characters ultimately seem goofy and belligerent. As Cammell said, the film "sees the man's world through the eyes of a woman." As in Performance, there's a sense that the lines between what is happening on and off screen are becoming blurred. In particular the relationship between Bruno and Alex echoes that between Cammell and his wife, a point Cammell himself acknowledged. "China is my proteg, which is what Bruno says about Alex I taught her everything I know everything I know, I pumped into China." With his drawling, cultured voice and ability always to tum an elegant phrase, Walken's Bruno even sounds a little like Cammell. And just as Bruno's proteg deserted him, Kong eventually left Cammell for a younger man, a music editor whom he had hired to work on the film. Anne Heche was quick to notice the autobiographical elements in the screenplay. "Something that goes along with risking so much is a kind of insanity on some level ‑ when you're willing to put so much of yourself on the line, you dont know quite what you're going to get The atmosphere which Donald creates on set is so impulsive and so ungrounded in reality Wild Side is exactly what this experience has been I think that was the goal." Time has lent some of Heche's remarks about "Cammell would take a piranha's money" her role a certain comic irony. "Wild Side for Alex," she observed, "is about making a choice to give up a life and a lifestyle to be with a woman... It's not the life choice I would make, but I don't think it matters." Asked about playing a lesbian, she remarked ingenuously, "There was a side of nie which said, oh my God, if there's a woman I would ever want to make love to, it's Joan Chen." Mazzola edits the seduction scene between Alex and Virginia with real delicacy. The smallest expression on each actress' face is registered. There's one beguiling moment when Virginia (talking about shoes) twirls round and round in her chair as Alex stares as if in a trance. When, later, they finally kiss, the camera captures the hesitance with which they touch one another. (In the Nu Image version, we're given a bathetic, lip‑smacking moment which ends with Heche cheerfully telling Chen, 'I've never done that before.") Not that Cammell was ever reticent when it came to depicting his characters' love lives. "It gets very juicy," he boasted during the shooting of the film. I don't know what the censor is going to do with this." His desire to shock clearly hadn't abated since the famous occasion when he and lagger wrote to Warner Bros telling them to leave Performance alone. "This film is about the perverted love affair between Homo Sapiens and Lady Violence," they informed the baffled studio executives. "In common with its subject, it's necessarily horrifying, paradoxical and absurd. If Performance doesn't upset audiences, it's nothing." There wouldn't have been much point in sending such a letter to Nu Image. Instead, Cammell quit the project.
Donald Cammell's Wild
Side, as the new version of the film is likely to be called, is a
director's cut with a difference. When Cammell walked off the original
movie he demanded that his name be removed. The film is credited to a
certain Franklin Brauner, evidently a close associate of Alan Smithee,
and it isn't yet established whether the Directors Guild will allow
Brauner's credit to be removed. But whether or not the new cut of Wild
Side, which receives its British premiere at [this year's] Edinburgh
Festival, really is a masterpiece to go alongside Performance, it is a
film no other director could have made. As Mazzola puts it, "s know when
this thing is finished ‑ when it's locked ‑ it's have Donald's signature
all over."
Bemerkungen und Hintergrundinfos:
Der Film:
German Christopher Walken-Forum
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Einige Änderungen in der
Director's Cut 2000 gegenüber der Version von 1995: 
