LIGHT SLEEPER

Rip It Up, Issue 191, 1 June 1993, Page 34

LIGHT SLEEPER

Director: Paul Schrader Schrader's latest film has slipped into our theatres a little late —more than a year after its Stateside release (Susan Sarandon filmed it immediately after Thelma and Louise). It's a gem. Schrader shows us the sinister yet resilient underbelly of the New York drug circuit, as Willem Dafoe fTwwf. r .mv - ii * ■*: ■" m 'vir~WM goes about his business delivering his sachets to Susan Sarandon's uptown clients. Yet it's a film which allows for some humour and humanity in its predominant bleakness.

Schrader's script doesn't waste (or mince) words, and what impresses is his formal control of the film as a director.' The street scenes (given a gleaming ambience by cameraman Ed Lachmann) and the various encounters with clients are balanced by a series of key confrontations between various characters: Dafoe and his ex-lover (the radiant Dana Delaney) in a hospital cafe, Dafoe in two discussions with his psychic (played by the director's wife, Mary Beth Hurt) and finally the optimistic meeting between Dafoe and a reformed Sarandon in the prison visiting room.

Only occasionally are there jarring elements. Perhaps Delaney's return to her former drug dependency is too sketchily motivated, and I found myself extremely distracted by a series of irritatingly trite songs which punctuated the narrative.

Dafoe's is a performance of great charm, one moment smiling engagingly, almost like a young James Dean, the next (particularly in the erotic scenes) ravaged in both body and spirit. Susan Sarandon resists the temptation to reduce her role to a catalogue of camp mannerisms (what might Faye Dunaway have done with this part?) and even reminds us of her time on the road as the renegade Louise, when she fearlessly takes on two armed thugs with a few sharp words and a handbag. WILLIAM DART